Farmer Markets

About the data

This site is an independently maintained, regularly refreshed directory of 9,132 farmers markets and public local-food places in 4,920 cities across 8 countries. It is built on directory data from the USDA Local Food Portal plus open data from 11 government publishers, normalized to a single schema, corrected where the source geocoding was wrong, and labelled with the age of each record.

What this directory is

One merged directory assembled from public sources. It is not an official government product and it is not affiliated with the USDA or with any of the publishers listed below; it is a third-party directory built on their published data, kept current against those same sources.

Two files hold the whole thing. One carries the 7,157 listings that originate in the USDA Local Food Portal directory. The other holds the 1,975 records from government open-data portals, and each one carries its publisher, dataset, catalogue URL and licence in its own provenance block, which is what the source line at the bottom of every market page prints.

Where the data comes from

USDA Local Food Portal — 7,157 records. The portal is live, and its farmers market directory publishes a keyless bulk export (the same endpoint its own CSV download button calls), which is what these records are refreshed against, matched on the portal’s own listing ID. The directory itself is at usdalocalfoodportal.com. Listings there are self-reported by the markets.

Official government open-data portals — 1,975 records from 11 publishers, refreshed nightly:

  • 663 records from New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets
  • 388 records from Government of Ontario
  • 356 records from California Department of Public Health
  • 146 records from Métropole de Lyon
  • 129 records from Singapore National Environment Agency
    • Hawker Centres · Singapore Open Data Licence · retrieved August 21, 2026 · NEA hawker centres and public markets; these are not producer-only farmers markets.
  • 94 records from Hong Kong Food and Environmental Hygiene Department
    • FEHD Public Markets - New Territories · Hong Kong Government open data terms · retrieved August 21, 2026 · FEHD public markets and cooked-food markets in the New Territories and outlying islands.
    • FEHD Public Markets - Hong Kong Island · Hong Kong Government open data terms · retrieved August 21, 2026 · FEHD public markets and cooked-food markets on Hong Kong Island.
    • FEHD Public Markets - Kowloon · Hong Kong Government open data terms · retrieved August 21, 2026 · FEHD public markets and cooked-food markets in Kowloon.
  • 65 records from District of Columbia Government
  • 64 records from Brussels-Capital Region
  • 56 records from Toulouse Métropole
  • 12 records from Upper Hutt City Council
    • Māra Kai - Community Gardens · Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 · retrieved August 21, 2026 · Community gardens in Upper Hutt; these are local-food places rather than retail farmers markets.
    • Food Cooperatives · Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 · retrieved August 21, 2026 · Food cooperative pickup locations and related local-food facilities in Upper Hutt; not a national market directory.
  • 2 records from Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council
    • CoCo Markets DLR · Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 · retrieved August 21, 2026 · Council-operated markets in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown; not a complete national directory.

How the records are processed

Both files are normalized to one schema — name, address, coordinates, season, days, products, payment methods, food-assistance programs, amenities, contact details — so a Singapore hawker centre and a New York farmers market answer the same questions in the same fields. Categories that are not producer-only farmers markets keep their own label (public food market, food cooperative pickup, community garden, hawker centre) rather than being flattened into one word.

A separate geo index resolves every record to a state or country hub and, where the address or coordinates allow it, to a city — collapsing the many spellings of the same state, recovering cities that the source left blank, and rejecting coordinates that fall outside the state the record claims. It currently places 9,123 of 9,132 records; 9 carry no usable location at all and appear only in the full directory.

Refreshes are conservative by design. Each government source is validated before it is written — invalid coordinates, duplicate IDs and slugs, record counts below a configured floor, and suspicious drops against the previous snapshot all reject the update, and a source that fails keeps its last good records while healthy sources update around it. On the USDA side only the fields the bulk export unambiguously provides are overwritten; contact details, schedules and parsed city/state/ZIP are left alone, because the export does not carry them and blanking them would be a loss. A URL is never regenerated for an existing record.

Dates are mirrored, never invented. A record’s “last verified” date is the upstream publisher’s own timestamp, copied across; it is never set to the time of the refresh. That is why some listings here openly show a date from years ago instead of today’s.

How often it updates

The government sources are re-fetched by a scheduled job every day at 08:17 UTC. The run normalizes and validates each source, rebuilds the snapshot, runs the parser tests and a production build, and only then commits — so a broken upstream cannot land on the site. Those sources were last retrieved on August 21, 2026.

The USDA half is refreshed on demand rather than nightly, because that is when upstream actually changes: a main pass in February or March, when markets update their listings ahead of opening day, a second pass mid-season, and ad-hoc runs after that. Changed pages are submitted to IndexNow as part of both refreshes.

Across the whole directory, record dates run from January 2, 2019 to July 13, 2026.

What the data covers

Coverage of the Farmer Markets directory, computed from the current data
MeasureCountShare
Markets and local-food places9,132—
From the USDA Local Food Portal directory7,15778%
From official government portals1,97522%
States, provinces and country hubs60—
Cities with at least one listing4,920—
Countries8—
Records stating their opening times1,77519%
Records stating which days they trade1,89921%
Records recorded as accepting SNAP/EBT6617%

Countries covered: Belgium, Canada, France, Hong Kong, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore, United States.

Known limitations

  • The sources are self-reported. Markets fill in their own listings on the USDA portal, and government portals publish what the market or the program administrator told them. A market can be open and absent, or listed and closed.
  • Some records are old, and say so. 952 listings carry an upstream date more than four years back and are labelled “may be out of date” on their page. Another 12 are no longer published in the USDA directory at all; those pages say so plainly. Delisted records are flagged rather than deleted — a listing can vanish because nobody renewed it, not because the market shut, and a working URL is worth more than a guess.
  • Coverage is uneven. Several government sources are deliberately partial — a single county, a single city, or one program’s authorized vendors rather than a complete national directory. The scope note on each source above says which.
  • Not every record answers every field. Opening times, days, payment methods and amenities are present only where the source supplied them. Pages omit what they do not know instead of filling in a plausible default, which is why two market pages can look very different.
  • Always check before you travel. Weather, holidays and mid-season schedule changes never reach any of these sources.

Reporting a correction

Two routes, and they do different things.

  • Tell us directly. A short form opens on the market directory; pick “Update or correct a listing” or “Get a market or local-food place listed” and describe the change. It reaches a monitored inbox.
  • Fix it at the source. This is the durable fix. A correction made with the original publisher — the market’s own listing on the USDA portal, or the government dataset linked beside each publisher above — flows through on the next refresh and reaches every other site that uses the same feed, not just this one.

Licensing and reuse

There is no single licence covering the whole directory, and none is claimed here. Each official record carries its publisher’s own terms in its provenance block, and those terms travel with the record — currently 8 distinct statements: Creative Commons Attribution; Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; District of Columbia open data terms; Hong Kong Government open data terms; Licence Ouverte 2.0; Open Government Licence - Ontario; Public data published by New York State; Singapore Open Data Licence. The USDA Local Food Portal records carry no licence statement of their own. If you intend to reuse this data, read the terms of the specific source that produced the records you need, and credit that publisher.

The two snapshots are served as-is, in the same shape the site reads them:

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