The data presented in this article are related to the research article 'Chemical and biological monitoring of the load of plant protection products and of zoocoenoses in ditches of the orchard region Altes Land' (Süß et al., 2006) [1], which is only available in the German language. The pesticide data presented here were acquired from four ditches (three ditches were located in apple orchards, and one ditch was located in a grassland region) between 2001 and 2003 (Lorenz et al., 2018) [2]. Two different monitoring strategies were applied: event-driven sampling after pesticide applications and weekly integrated sampling using automatic water samplers. A total of 70 active substances were monitored while farmers applied 25 active substances. This article describes the study sites and the analytical methods used to quantify the pesticides in the water samples. The field data set is publicly available at the OpenAgrar repository under https://doi.org/10.5073/20180213-144359 (Lorenz et al., 2018) [2].