Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “Search”
Expanded Data and Future plans
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.
How We Turned a Prototype into a Useful Market Map (with Codex)
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.
What the Search Data Told Us (and Why We Listened)
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.