Farmers Markets: What the USDA Directory Actually Says

Every row prints the distance, because a market 38 miles away is a fact about that town rather than about yours, then the season and weekly hours exactly as the operator filed them with USDA, and the date they filed them.

Where enough listings in a state give a season this site can read as a range, it takes the median opening day and the median closing day across all of them, with the year each operator filed under thrown away. That is the only defensible way to combine a season filed in 2019 with one filed in 2024: both are saying something about a week of the calendar rather than about a date.

The spread is the interesting part. Texas has the earliest median opening in the country at March 15, and Connecticut the latest at June 3. Texas has the longest median season at about 33 weeks. A northern state runs a short, dense summer market season; a southern one runs a long one, and several southern markets simply never close, which is why year round listings are set aside from these medians rather than folded into them.

29 states have enough readable seasons for a median. 21 have too few filed seasons for one: Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Delaware, West Virginia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, New Mexico, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, Alaska and Hawaii; their pages carry the individual listings instead. The threshold is 12 readable seasons: under about a dozen, a median moves by weeks when one listing is added.

USDA’s National Farmers Market Directory is a federal dataset with a confusing address history, and it is worth writing down because the two links a search engine still hands you are both broken. The original search.ams.usda.gov address no longer resolves at all. The AMS file that data.gov still points at returns a 404. The live directory is at usdalocalfoodportal.com, built under a Cooperative Agreement between Michigan State University and USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service and carrying USDA’s own OMB control number 0581-0169.

That is where this snapshot came from, on 2026-09-04. The records are US Government work in the public domain, so they can be reproduced; a market’s current status is the market’s own to publish.

Two subtractions. The directory holds no state column, only a free text address, so every listing is placed by its ZIP against the Census ZCTA table this site already ships and by its address text where there is no usable ZIP. 76 of the 7,148 listings are in Washington DC, Puerto Rico or another jurisdiction outside the fifty states and are counted here rather than filed into a neighbouring state, and 5 give an address with no state and no readable ZIP in it at all. That leaves the 7,067 markets on these pages.

The portal itself puts the same bar as a definition, rendered with its authorship note. That definition is doing real work: it is what separates a farmers market from a single farm selling its own produce at the gate, which USDA keeps in a different directory and which this site covers in its pick your own pages instead.