USDA Local Food Directories

The USDA Local Food Directories are five public, federally-maintained datasets operated by the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) that catalog producer-direct retail across the United States. The directories are [[0mn1one|the platform]]‘s principal structured-data source for markets-and-CSA listings and the bedrock under the /markets route.

The five directories

All five share a common schema and license, and all are downloadable from usdalocalfoodportal.com:

• Farmers Markets (~8,600 entries) — the largest; periodic markets where multiple producers sell direct.
• CSA ([[community-supported-agriculture|Community-Supported Agriculture]]) — subscription-based farms where consumers buy a season’s share up front.
• Food Hubs — regional aggregation-and-distribution operations that move product from many small producers to retail or institutional buyers.
• On-Farm Markets — farm-stand and direct-[[farm-stand|on-farm retail]].
• Agritourism — working farms that also offer pick-your-own, tours, lodging, education.

License and attribution

The data is released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY 4.0). As federal-government-produced data it is also generally public domain in the U.S. Either way, [[0mn1one|the platform]] redistributes with attribution.

Canonical attribution string (use on any page or feed that surfaces this data):

Data: USDA Agricultural Marketing Service — Local Food Directories. https://www.usdalocalfoodportal.com/. Licensed CC-BY 4.0.

Schema (Farmers Markets — representative)

The CSV uses a | (pipe) separator in live USDA downloads. [[0mn1one|The platform]]‘s sample CSV at _raw/sources/usda-farmers-markets-sample.csv uses commas for readability; the ingest script accepts either via --sep. Columns:

• [[eating-the-landscape|Identity]] — FMID (7-digit primary key), MarketName, Website, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, OtherMedia
• Address — street, City, County, State, zip
• Geographic — x (longitude), y (latitude), Location (venue type: federal grounds, educational institution, faith-based, private business, etc.)
• Season — up to four blocks of Season{N}Date (e.g., 05/04/2024 to 11/23/2024) and Season{N}Time (e.g., Sat: 8:30 AM-1:30 PM)
• Payment booleans (Y/N/-) — Credit, WIC, WICcash, SFMNP, SNAP
• Product booleans (Y/N/-) — Organic, Bakedgoods, Cheese, Crafts, Flowers, Eggs, Seafood, Herbs, Vegetables, Honey, Jams, Maple, Meat, Nursery, Nuts, Plants, Poultry, Prepared, Soap, Trees, Wine, Coffee, Beans, Fruits, Grains, Juices, Mushrooms, PetFood, Tofu, WildHarvested
• Metadata — updateTime

Sibling directories (CSA, Food Hubs, On-Farm Markets, Agritourism) use overlapping but not-identical schemas; the ingest script handles per-kind variations via the --kind argument.

Obtaining fresh data

1. Visit https://www.usdalocalfoodportal.com/fe/datasharing/.
2. Register an account (free) and request data-sharing access.
3. Download the CSV for [[directory|the directory]] you want, or request an API key for the REST endpoint at https://www.usdalocalfoodportal.com/api/farmersmarket/.
4. Save the raw file to _raw/sources/usda-<kind>-<YYYY-MM>.csv (immutable per [[0mn1one|the platform]]‘s raw-source convention).
5. Run the ingest script: python3 _private/scripts/ingest-usda-markets.py --input _raw/sources/usda-farmers-markets-2026-05.csv --sep '|'.
6. Append a ## Closed gaps (log) line to vault-source-roadmap.md noting the refresh date and what changed.

How the platform uses this data

The data sits in three layers per the [[karpathy-llm-wiki|Karpathy three-layer pattern]]:

1. Raw layer — _raw/sources/usda-farmers-markets-*.csv. Immutable once filed; refreshed on schedule.
2. Data layer — src/data/markets.json, generated by _private/scripts/ingest-usda-markets.py. Normalized, bioregion-tagged, cross-linked by FMID to any curated wiki entry.
3. Curated layer — src/content/wiki/<market-slug>.md with entity_type: market and fmid: <integer>. Each curated entry layers editorial weight (story, alignment, partnership, the founder having visited) on top of the raw row. Currently 5 curated entries: [[st-george-greenmarket|St. George Greenmarket]] (FMID 1000093), [[cold-spring-farmers-market|Cold Spring]] (FMID 1006440), [[pocono-mountains-farmers-market|Pocono Mountains]] (not in 2024 snapshot), [[harrington-farmers-market|Harrington]] (FMID 1003781), [[floods-nursery-farm-market|Floods Nursery]] (not in the 2024 snapshot — Floods is a private farm-stand, sometimes appears in the On-Farm Market directory rather than Farmers Markets).

Current ingest

As of 2026-05-08 the data layer holds 8,681 farmers markets ingested from a 2024 public snapshot of [[directory|the directory]] (_raw/sources/usda-farmers-markets-2024-snapshot.csv). The snapshot was sourced from a publicly-mirrored copy and contains the reduced 10-column schema (FMID, MarketName, address, lat/long, Organic). The full 59-column schema with all payment and product booleans requires registration at usdalocalfoodportal.com — the ingest script handles both schemas via case-insensitive multi-name field lookup; future refreshes against the full schema will populate the additional fields automatically.

The 8,681 rows are filterable by bioregion on the /markets route. As of this ingest: 265 markets fall inside the platform’s 8 known bioregions ([[annadale|Staten Island]], NYC, [[hudson-highlands|Hudson Highlands]], Poconos, Delmarva Peninsula, New Orleans, Sea Islands, Driftless Area); the remaining ~8,400 markets are browsable by state via expandable <details> sections.

The /markets route renders the data layer with curated entries cross-linked. The /directory route shows only the curated layer (markets with listed: true).

The general pattern this implements — raw structured data into [[0mn1one|the platform]] — is documented at _knowledge/playbooks/structured-data-ingest.md.

Lenses still to grow

• The CSA directory ingest — same script, --kind csa, but the schema differs (no FMID-equivalent stable key; rows are keyed differently). Worth doing when CSA visibility becomes a platform priority.
• Refresh cadence — USDA refreshes irregularly; a periodic check (every 3–6 months) and an automated diff against the previous ingest would surface market closures and openings.
• Quality flags — some rows are stale, mislabeled, or have empty addresses. The ingest script could grow a quality-flag pass that downgrades or hides obviously-broken rows.
• State directories — many states maintain their own farmers-market directories with finer detail than the federal one (e.g., NY State Department of Agriculture and Markets). State-data ingest is a clean future extension of the same pipeline.
• Local Harvest, [[slow-food|Slow Food]] USA — these are non-federal sources with overlapping but distinct coverage; license is more restrictive but worth investigating if federal coverage proves insufficient.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Enables: [[0mn1one]]
• Counterpart to: [[organic-agriculture]]
• Member of: [[organization]]