RipeNearby

Where our farm data comes from

RipeNearby is built on open, official agricultural data — not scraped from other directories. Listings are refreshed July 27, 2026 and re-checked weekly.

Primary source

USDA Local Food Portal

Our agritourism, CSA, farmers market, food hub and on-farm market listings come from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) Local Food Portal. The legacy National Farmers Market Directory is published on data.gov under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY) license. We credit the USDA AMS as required, and never copy listings or descriptions from pickyourown.org or any commercial directory.

About the archived listings: alongside the live portal data we also carry the National Farmers Market Directory 2014 snapshot — about 8,100 markets. Most of those have no matching record in the current USDA directories, so rather than drop them we keep them clearly marked “2014 archive”. They may be out of date, and any that the live feeds do match are merged and re-verified automatically. Only those listings carry that label.

Why so many listings say “not verified since”:USDA publishes an update date with each record, and its own dates run old — the current agritourism directory contains records last touched anywhere from 2014 to this year. We show that date rather than smooth it over: a listing reads “USDA-verified” only if USDA updated it within the last two years, and “USDA-listed” where USDA gives no date at all. The place is still in the current directory either way — it's the details (hours, phone, website) that may have drifted.

State agriculture departments

Published directly by the states

USDA runs no pick-your-own directory, so our U-pick listings come from the state agriculture departments that publish one as open data. These are the departments whose data we currently carry, credited as the source of the records they contribute.

As the states publish it: these datasets are provided for information only, and the departments reserve the right to correct or replace them without notice. They make no warranty as to accuracy or completeness, and neither do we — check with the farm before travelling.

How we keep it fresh

  1. 01

    Pull official records

    We ingest the five USDA Local Food Portal directories via their public API and bulk files.

  2. 02

    Enrich with seasonality

    We add regional crop calendars so every listing shows what's ripe right now, not just what it grows.

  3. 03

    Re-check daily

    A scheduled job re-pulls the USDA data every day and logs what changed.

Always free for farms

Listings come from public USDA data — farms never pay to appear.

Ads are clearly labeled

Every ad is marked and never blocks the search experience.

Freshness you can see

Each listing shows when it was last verified against USDA records.

Run a farm or market?

Spotted something out of date, or want to be listed? The USDA portal is the system of record — but tell us and we'll help.