About
About Grown Local
Grown Local is a free, public directory that helps US consumers find local food sources near them — farmers markets, CSAs, on-farm markets, agritourism, and food hubs. Every listing comes from the USDA Local Food Portal, a public dataset updated continuously by the US Department of Agriculture.
We don't add listings by hand. We don't take payment from businesses to rank higher. We pull the USDA data, clean it up, and make it searchable with a ZIP code — that's it.
How the data works
Our data refreshes weekly from the USDA portal. Every listing shows when it was last updated by its operator in the USDA system; that's the most authoritative information we have. Hours, seasons, accepted payments, and product mix can change after the listing was last edited, so always double-check with the market or farm before you drive out.
What's missing
The USDA dataset doesn't carry phone numbers, email addresses, or website URLs — which is why those details aren't on our listing pages. The best next step is usually the Get directions button: Google Maps often surfaces the same business's contact info once you land on the map.
Roughly 0.3% of the USDA rows are missing GPS coordinates, which makes them unsearchable on a radius-based site like ours. Those listings don't appear here. If you know about a market or farm that should be on the USDA portal but isn't, the portal accepts submissions directly.
Who runs this
Grown Local is a solo side project. If you spot something broken, have a feature idea, or want to say hi, there's a contact form.
How it's paid for
The site is free and intended to stay free. Hosting runs on the free tier of a static site host; we pay for the domain and nothing else. Revenue, when it exists, comes from Google AdSense ads. We don't sell user data and we don't have anything to sell.