Where the data comes from

Sources

• 7,006 markets from the USDA National Farmers Market Directory, run by the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service with Michigan State University. Market operators submit and update their own entries.
• 288 markets from OpenStreetMap that have no USDA counterpart within half a mile. The federal directory is opt-in, so it simply misses markets that never filled in the form. These listings say where they came from, on the page.
• 4,608 farm stands and 1,722 CSA farms from the USDA's on-farm market and CSA directories, which work the same way and are kept as separate sections because a farm stand is not a farmers market.
• Locations verified against the US Census Bureau geocoder.

The bulk export is not the whole directory

This is worth stating plainly, because several competing directories get it wrong. The USDA's bulk download — the file you get without an API key — is a flat survey table containing a name, one free-text address string, coordinates, and checkbox fields for benefit programs, payments and growing practices. It contains no city or state column, no opening hours, no season, no product list and no website.

Those fields do exist, on each market's own listing page on the USDA portal, served by a public endpoint that needs no key. We read them from there. That is where this site's hours, seasons, product lists, vendor counts and website links come from — 4,583 websites and 1,993 sets of opening hours that the bulk file does not contain.

Two fields on those pages are published as images rather than text — the operator's email address and phone number. That is a deliberate measure against harvesting, so we leave them alone and link you to the market instead.

What we do to it

• Address parsing. City, state and ZIP are extracted from the single address string, which arrives in dozens of shapes — trailing driving directions, duplicated state names, four-digit ZIPs with the leading zero lost.
• Location verification. Every market is reverse geocoded to confirm its state and to catch venue names the parser mistook for a city ("Lincolnway Cheyenne" → "Cheyenne"). Where the address and the coordinates name different states and the city name cannot break the tie, we keep the address and drop the coordinates rather than plot a market 900 miles away.
• Duplicate merging. 0 listings were the same market registered twice — operators re-register instead of editing. We keep the most recently updated entry and let it inherit contact details from the stale copy.
• No invention. Nothing is generated to fill a blank. If a field is empty in every source, the page says so.

Measured accuracy

A random sample of 150 listings was checked against the Census geocoder on 2026-08-25: 100% of parsed states matched the coordinates. City names matched Census place names on 81.3% of that sample — most of the gap is legal boundaries rather than error (a Pensacola address Census files under Brent, a Fort Worth one under Haltom City), and we keep the name people actually use. 160 listings had venue text repaired out of the city field.

Known gaps

• Hours: 27% coverage. 1,993 of 7,294 markets publish opening times somewhere we can verify. The rest show no hours rather than a guess.
• Season: 20%. Products: 22%. These are optional fields on the USDA form and most operators skip them.
• Websites: 63% coverage, plus 3,505 markets with a social page.
• Freshness. Each market page shows when its operator last updated the listing. Many have not been touched in years, and some of those markets have since closed.
• Benefit programs are self-reported. A market not tagged SNAP/EBT has not told the USDA it accepts EBT — which is not the same as refusing it. Treat the absence as unknown. OpenStreetMap-sourced listings carry no benefit data at all.
• Sixteen listings were dropped for containing no recoverable city or state, and a further 61 OpenStreetMap markets were left out because no Census place or township covers their coordinates. Another 0 farm listings were removed for being the same operation as a farmers market already listed — some businesses register in two USDA directories at once.

Two USDA directories we left out

The USDA also publishes an agritourism directory of 13,569 listings and a food hub directory of 480. Neither is here, deliberately.

• Agritourism. Both its bulk export and its per-listing endpoint return a name and an address and nothing else — no activities, no season, no hours. Publishing it would mean 13,569 pages with nothing on them, which helps nobody looking for a pumpkin patch.
• Food hubs. Wholesale aggregators that sell to restaurants and institutions rather than to you.

If the agritourism data improves, it goes in. Until then the number of listings on this site is smaller than it could be, on purpose.

Licensing and attribution

USDA directory data is US government work in the public domain. OpenStreetMap data is © OpenStreetMap contributors under the Open Database License. Census geocoding results are public domain. This site is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any of them.

Found something wrong?

Send a correction. Reports that include a source — the market's own page or social post — get applied fastest.