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The map keeps getting better. Over the past week we ingested five USDA datasets—farmers markets, CSAs, food hubs, on-farm markets, and agritourism listings—bringing 27,383 locations into a single search experience. Zip and city centroids work across every category, type filtering is instant, and the state search is back on track after we taught the parser to ignore “USA” in the address tail.

Now we’re lining up the next round of polish: a “Get directions” link on every result and map pin. It’s a simple, familiar action and the clearest path to enjoying fresh food in real life.

We’ve been quietly reshaping Fresh Local Harvest over the past few weeks. The goal was simple: make it easier to find nearby farmers markets—without asking you to learn a new interface or guess the right search terms. Along the way we moved our workflow into Codex inside VS Code, which turned out to be exactly the nudge we needed to finish the job.

The short version

• We removed a fragile detour that depended on a flaky government API and committed to a single, reliable Excel → website path.
• We enriched the data so the map understands cities, states, and ZIP codes the way people actually search.
• The map now shows results near you, and pins display useful details (name, address, programs like SNAP/WIC).
• It all deploys cleanly to Cloudflare Pages when we push changes.

Why we changed course

Earlier, the project tried to do two things at once: fetch live data from a government API and process spreadsheets locally. That split left both halves half-done. We decided to focus on one path—the local spreadsheet method—because it’s dependable and gives us control over data quality.

Today Fresh Local Harvest officially moved into its new home at freshlocalharvest.org. It’s fast, clean, and blissfully quiet—no servers to baby, no mystery processes humming at 3 a.m. Just a static site that gets out of the way so we can focus on the market data and the stories behind it.

Was it perfectly smooth? Of course not. But we had an extra brain in the room to keep things calm when the buttons hid and the acronyms started shouting.

We started with a mystery.
The map on our site was blank — no pins, no interactivity, just a lonely placeholder where a lively directory of farmers markets used to be. Somewhere along the way, after restructuring the repo and switching branches, the data that powered the map had vanished.

Our goal was clear: bring the map back to life.

Step 1: Following the Breadcrumbs

The first thing we discovered was that the data folder was empty. The map had been reading from a local markets.json file, and that file no longer existed. No wonder the pins were gone.

We looked at how people actually search for farmers markets and, surprise: the internet behaves like a Saturday morning. There are early birds, there are seasonal stampedes, and “near me” rules the day. That little bit of reality-check shaped our stack and our rollout plan more than any fancy diagram.

What we looked at

• Seasonality: peaks around spring openings, summer abundance, and the fall harvest (pumpkins do numbers).
• Weekly rhythm: predictable bumps late week and Saturday mornings.
• Geography: sunbelt states (hello, Florida) show longer seasons and higher baseline interest than colder states (hi, Ohio), but both spike when markets open.
• Intent: “farmers market near me,” “hours,” “open now,” and “SNAP/EBT” show up a lot—short, local, urgent.

Takeaway: we’re building for spikes, mobile, and quick answers.

Data hunts rarely start glamorous. Ours began with a simple question: where do we find a reliable, national list of farmers markets? Then came spreadsheets, acronyms, and a lot of “huh, that’s interesting.”

The short version

We sourced a national directory, normalized it into a clean, portable database, added guardrails for trust, and exposed it via an API that’s fast enough for maps and simple enough for people. Not perfect yet—but solid, explainable, and built to improve.

Fresh food is a local story. It’s neighbors with tables, growers with early mornings, and a quick “what’s good today?” across a pile of tomatoes. Fresh Local Harvest exists to make that connection easier—and to show that you don’t need to be a programmer to build something useful with AI at your side.

Why we’re doing this

Because finding reliable, current info about farmers markets shouldn’t require detective work. We wanted a place that’s fast, clean, and up-to-date—just the essentials: what’s nearby, when it runs, how to reach them, and whether they accept SNAP.