Where our farm data comes from

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 They may be out of date, and any that the live feeds do match are merged and re-verified automatically.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.

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.

ℹ️ 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.

Photos and picking seasons

📷 Every photo on this site is a stock photograph. None of the USDA or state directories carry images, so we pick a library photo that matches what a listing grows and what kind of place it is. It is chosen to be representative, not accurate: it is not a picture of that business, its fields, or its produce, and farm pages label it as such. Photos come from Unsplash under their licence.

🗓️ “Ripe right now” is a typical-season estimate, not a report from the field.We keep a crop calendar — the months each crop usually runs in each region — and compare it against today's date. That is where the ripeness rings, “in season now” and “peak picking” come from. No farm tells us what is ripe, and we have no live feed of picking conditions: a cold spring, a drought or a sold-out weekend will not show up here. The calendar is our own editorial estimate, compiled from state extension-service guides. Always call the farm before travelling for a specific crop.