Farmers’ Market APIShare This
Posted on August 8, 2011 by John Mertens in CfA Labs

I love getting my fruit and veggies from my local Farmer’ Market. Unfortunately, as a recent SF transplant I wasn’t sure how to find my local Farmers’ Market. A quick search led me to a USDA website which seemed to contain most of the markets in the country.

Being an open data geek, I looked for an API. Finding none, I decided to make one. To do this, I:

  1. Used the “Export to Excel” function to download the whole dataset.
  2. Cleaned it up in Google Refine; normalized some fields, geocoded some records, added a geojson fields.
  3. Uploaded it to a free couchdb instance.
  4. Added the open source geocouch-utils CouchApp (which gives you a nice map out of the box).

All of this was done in about an hour and at a cost of $0.

So if you’re a developer who also likes fresh fruit & veg, build something on it. I’ll be down on Fillmore.

  • resident_computer_genius

    great work, very impressive knowing how to piece that together

  • http://www.thinkhard-ly.com Yusha Hu

    FYI there’s also a search engine for farmer’s markets and CSAs at http://www.localharvest.org

  • http://www.3scale.net Guillaume

    Really great !! I love the idea!! And fantastic job at putting all that together so fast !!

    You should also check 3scale’s Free Self-Service API Management solution to get analytics, a developer portal and other stuff like that. It just takes a few minutes to sign up for the service and install the plugin.

    http://www.3scale.net

  • http://imperialwicket.com/usda-farmers-markets-to-api-or-not-to-api imperialWicket :: USDA Farmers Markets – To API or not to API

    [...] BackgroundCode For America: Farmers Market APIHacker News CommentaryImpatient? Want the JSON? It's over here.My thoughtsAt first, I thought this was great, and I started thinking about whipping together an Android application that used the API. After putting together a couple of screens and thinking about how little control I had over performance, I started to side strongly with cousin_it from the Hacker News commentary. How large is this data set really? And since any updates are going to need to manually push anyway, what is the benefit in offering the API? Don't read to far into this, I definitely think John's initial work was worthwhile, and it opened my eyes to a useful data set I had not previously endeavored to find. Nonetheless, from a performance a practicallity standpoint (for this data set) – I think a simple JSON object is probably more justified. Also, the map performs terribly, I knew from some experience with the MarkerClusterer (I hadn't touched it since back in the API V2 days) that the performance could be drastically improved with clustering. This was also reaffirmed in the HN Comments (noblethrasher).Stepping backOk, scratch the Android app, what about a map? Easy enough, but without the API, I need the data. I must admit, I admire John's capabilities even more here. It didn't cost me any money, but it sucked away far more than an hour of my life. First, the Excel format download from USDA would not actually load in LibreOffice. I even tried firing up an old Mac that had Office 2008 on it. After 15 minutes of office updates and installation procedures on the old Mac (I apparently had never used Office on it), I found that the downloaded Export.xls file crashed Excel 2008 Mac too. More determined than ever, I threw a handful of sed commands at the file until I had something that looked more like a csv file and less like my cat sitting on my keyboard repeatedly pasting:< /td>< td align='left' valign='top' style='word-wrap:break-word;'>onto the screen. There are a lot of stray line breaks, a few special characters, and who knows what else in there. I also tried to load the original download into Google Refine before manually updating, no luck there either. On that note, I also need to thank John for highlighting Google Refine (and its origin Freebase Gridworks). I was not familiar with the project, and I think I will use it quite a bit.Pretty smooth sailing once I had the Google Refine project loaded. I spent a little time cleaning (not enough), and set about making a rudimentary Google Map page that uses marker clustering. A careful eye will notice that the index.html is suspiciously similar to several of the default Google Maps sample pages.The JSON and a sample MapI did not want to host the json files myself or deal with the API key for the map, so I am just posting the files to my github account. If you pull the files they should run fine API key-less from a localhost environment. Anyone who wants to grab the JSON can then do whatever they want with the data, and not deal with some of the cleanup that I already performed.The index.html file also includes a decent sample of getting the MarkerClusterer set up with InfoWindows too. The code is dirty, and could use some comments, but it is functional. People commented on both codeforamerica and hacker news that localharvest.org does something similar already, though I don't believe they offer the api. Also, their map does not perform all that much better. It is speedier to load, but it fails a little bit on the usability spectrum. Again, in case anyone missed [...]

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_GIYFT23775S5JYOBF2YH2652QU ricky c

    Will you update the API in October when new data is available from the USDA?  

  • http://twitter.com/foodfolio Foodfolio

    Love love it. If only we can sync it up with Foodfolio recipes, and find dishes to make with local ingredients. 

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  • Anonymous

    Nice story. FYI the map is unusable on my iPad.

  • http://www.blog.arghh.net/aj/?p=926 pinboard August 13, 2011 — arghh.net

    [...] Farmers’ Market API | Code for America More on Farmer’s Markets from the USDA Open data let @mertonium build a farmer’s market AP I [...]

  • http://blog.apievangelist.com/2011/08/13/united-states-farmers-market-api/ United States Farmers Market API | API Evangelist

    [...] found a story from John Mertens of Code for America, about building a Famers Market API, which I think tells a great story about how anyone with a need, can take a valuable dataset and [...]

  • Vishnu Menon

    Does anyone know what the possible parameters for this api are? is there anything other than Bounding Box? a lat-lon coordinate and a radius would be great.

  • http://www.foodscienceproductdevelopment.com/industry-news/farmers-markets-at-your-fingertips-how-the-community-is-using-our-open-data/ Farmers Markets at Your Fingertips: How the Community is Using Our Open Data | Food Science Chef

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  • http://twitter.com/mathyouwheeler M. Wheeler

    Would you elaborate as to why it is not working on your iPad?

  • http://www.webby-and-wappy.fr/acces/Games/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&p=180307#180307 Jon Chung

    abraded wound…

    Thank you for posting this, Its just what I was browsing on bing. Id very much rather hear opinions from an individual, rather than a corporate web page, thats why I like blogs so much. Thanks!. Thank you for posting this, Its just what I was browsing …

  • http://theneighborhoodentrepreneur.com Tolis Dimopoulos

    I love APIs and what you’ve done here, but it has to be maintained to be useful. Will you maintain and support your API?

  • http://codeforamerica.org/2011/09/27/a-data-liberation-walkthrough/ A Data Liberation Walkthrough | Code for America

    [...] time I wrote about how to build a US-wide farmers’ market API in under an hour. Today, I want to walk through a larger challenge to highlight some of the tools [...]

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  • http://lookzi.com jami

    Awesome.  This is working really well on my geolocation info aggregator, lookzi.com.  Based on the Google Analytics, Farmers’ Markets are more popular than Groupon Deals.  ;)

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  • Rob O’Donnell

    Would love to use this. With the data be maintained? Nice work!

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  • Sean Gregory

    Was it not possible to retain or use the schedule data for the markets? it would be really nice to get results based on availablity

John Mertens 2011 Fellow

John is a full stack developer with an emphasis on rapid prototyping and data wrangling.
@mertonium | Bio & Posts →