Data Sources & Methodology
Primary source
All 7,948 farmers markets in our directory come from the USDA Local Food Portal, a free public dataset maintained by the United States Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Marketing Service.
Download the dataset
Everything below is CC BY 4.0 — free to use, share, and build on with attribution ("Harvestly Markets, derived from USDA Local Food Portal data").
- Record-level dataset — all 7,948 markets (name, location, coordinates, website, season, SNAP/organic and other attributes): CSV · JSON
- State-level aggregates (market/CSA/farm-stand counts, SNAP, organic, and website coverage by state): CSV · JSON
- Archived, citable version: Zenodo — DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21247900
- Mirrors: Hugging Face · Kaggle · GitHub
The record-level files exclude scraped third-party content (which we can't relicense) and personal contact names/emails. Files regenerate with every directory rebuild; the Zenodo archive is versioned snapshots.
How we use it
We pull two USDA endpoints and merge them:
- Bulk directory download — gives us the complete universe of markets, plus rich attribute data (SNAP/EBT acceptance, accepted payment methods, organic certification status, on-site offerings).
- Live API — overlays per-market contact info, social media URLs, season descriptions, and product lists.
Where both sources have the same field, the live API wins because it's typically fresher. About 80% of markets in our directory have full live enrichment.
How we clean the registry — and what changed in July 2026
The USDA feed is a registry, not a curated directory. Markets register themselves, and nothing forces an old record to retire when a new one is filed. That produces duplicates and mis-filed records that inflate any straight count of the feed. We remove them, and we publish what we removed.
On 21 July 2026 our national market count changed from 8,863 to 7,948. Two classes of record came out, 912 in total:
- 512 registry twins. A 2023 USDA re-registration wave re-filed many markets under new listing IDs without retiring the old rows, so the same market appeared twice. We merged each pair and kept the better-populated record. Every retired URL redirects to the surviving one.
- 400 vendor-class records. Some state feeds invert the vendor/market relationship and file individual farms and produce stands as if they were markets. Those belong in our farm-stand directory, not the market count.
The thing we got wrong first is worth stating. Our initial pass flagged suspected vendor-class records by name, on the theory that a real farmers market usually says so in its title. That heuristic was wrong about 30% of the time — 178 of 596 flagged records were genuine markets, including California's entire CDFA certified-market roster and the Massachusetts MDAR roster, because whole state registries name markets after their town rather than their function. Every removal was re-checked against the relevant state Department of Agriculture registry before it was applied. A shared address was likewise not treated as evidence of a shared market: distinct markets are routinely filed under an operator's administrative address or a shared winter venue.
Both decision ledgers are part of the published dataset, so any removal can be audited or reversed. If you cited an earlier figure from us, 8,863 was our published count until 21 July 2026 and 7,948 is the count after de-duplication.
Two footnotes for anyone working with the numbers directly. The per-state CSV sums to 7,943 rather than 7,948: 5 records carry no reliable state signal and we leave them unassigned rather than guess. And the per-capita map covers 51 jurisdictions — it excludes Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, which have no comparable population denominator in the same series.
The same gap applies to every other column, so here it is in full. Nationally we count 1,985 CSA programs, 904 markets indicating SNAP/EBT and 1,046 listing certified-organic vendors. Sum those columns in the per-state CSV and you get 1,955, 902 and 1,045. The differences are the same kind of record as above — 30 CSA listings and 5 markets we cannot confidently place in a state — which stay in the national totals and out of the state rows rather than being distributed by guesswork. If a national figure of ours does not match the column you summed, this is why.
One definition worth stating, since it is not guessable from the column name: the SNAP/EBT count is the number of markets flagged under either of the two separate acceptance fields in the source feed. Reading only one of them undercounts by several hundred. And because the feed leaves both fields empty on a large minority of records, every SNAP figure we publish is a floor rather than a measured acceptance rate.
Refresh cadence
The directory rebuilds from the USDA's data on a weekly schedule. Individual market profiles update when the USDA refreshes them — which can range from monthly to years, depending on how often the local market manager submits updates to USDA. Beyond the USDA feed, we also hand-research individual listings for real season, hours, products, and contacts — see the recently updated listings.
How stale is the registry? Of the 7,948 markets we publish, 277 — 3.5% — have been updated in the USDA registry since the start of 2024. Another 6,321 carry an update date older than that, and 1,350 carry no update date at all — for those we genuinely do not know, and we would rather say so than round it into the stale pile. We publish this number rather than bury it, because it is the whole reason this project exists: the federal registry is the most complete list of America's farmers markets and much of it is badly out of date, so we hand-research listings on top of it. The figure is computed at build time from the same records in the dataset you can download above — not typed in by hand — so it moves when the registry moves.
What this means for you
Addresses and locations are reliable — once a market registers with USDA, its location rarely changes. Lat/lng coordinates are sourced from USDA directly.
Hours and seasonal dates can drift. Many markets update their USDA listing infrequently. Before planning a trip, we recommend calling ahead or checking the market's own website (when available) for current operating hours.
SNAP/EBT acceptance is generally stable. Markets that participate tend to maintain it; markets that don't rarely add it without promoting the change.
Field coverage statistics
Below is the per-field coverage across our 7,948 markets as of the last directory rebuild (August 28, 2026). These numbers reflect what we serve and what's in the record-level download above — USDA data plus our cleaning, dead-link stripping, and website backfill.
| Field | Coverage | Markets | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lat/lng coordinates | 98.7% | 7,843 | Used for geo-nearest fallback + per-market maps |
| ZIP code on record | 93.2% | 7,408 | Powers /zip/<ZIP>/ lookup pages |
| Phone number | 77.6% | 6,171 | Normalized to E.164 in schema markup |
| Website URL | 42.8% | 3,405 | After dead-link stripping; includes our backfill from live API + state sources |
| Season / operating dates | 38.1% | 3,028 | Free-text from USDA — hours may have changed |
| Accepts SNAP | 8% | 638 | Self-reported to USDA; cross-listed in /snap-ebt/ |
| USDA-certified organic vendors | 13.2% | 1,046 | At least one certified organic vendor on site |
Reuse this data
Our statistics and record-level data are free to cite and reuse with attribution (CC BY 4.0) — download them above, browse the statistics hub, or grab a ready-made chart from the embed page. For the full annual analysis built on this data — including the 2025–2026 policy changes and where the official count record ends — read The State of U.S. Farmers Markets 2026.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the USDA AMS team for maintaining the Local Food Portal and exposing it as public data. The market directory is a public-good resource for U.S. food access; we're glad to help surface it.