About Stackyard
A free directory of UK farm shops, pick-your-own, farm parks, vineyards and farm cafes — built from official public records, run by someone who farms.
Who runs this site
My name is Jack. I am 23, I farm in Norfolk, and I am a member of my local Young Farmers Club. Stackyard is mine — I built it, I maintain the data behind it, and I am the person you get if you email about a listing.
That photo is from NFYFC Competitions Day 2024, where I won the Situations Vacant (16-21) competition. It works like a real job application: you send a CV and covering letter to the judges in advance, then sit a proper interview on the day. The role I applied for was data engineer — which, looking at what this site turned into, was apparently not a phase. NFYFC's write-up of the day is here if you want to check that rather than take my word for it.
The reason Stackyard exists is straightforward. Farms near me sell direct: beef boxes, veg, milk from a vending machine at the end of a track, strawberries in June. Some of those businesses are genuinely good and almost impossible to find online unless you already know they are there. Meanwhile the directories that do exist tend to be either 20 years out of date, or a pay-to-list arrangement where the farms that appear are the ones that paid, not the ones that are nearby.
Young Farmers is a big part of why I thought this was worth doing. You spend enough evenings with people your own age who are trying to make a small farm business work, and you notice how much of the struggle is just being found. A farm can have a superb shop and no realistic route to anyone searching for one twelve miles away.
So this is the two halves of me pointed at the same problem: the farming side knows why these businesses are hard to pin down, and the data side is stubborn enough to go and build the join properly rather than type 3,000 listings in by hand.
What being a farmer does and does not qualify me for. It means I understand how these businesses actually run — why a shop shuts for three weeks in spring, why the pick-your-own opens late in a cold year, why the person serving you was on a tractor an hour earlier. It does not mean I have visited the 3,024 places listed here. I have not, and this site never pretends otherwise.
What this site actually is
Stackyard is a directory of who exists and where, assembled from open government data and published with the source shown on every page. Right now that is 3,024 businesses across 206 UK counties and council areas, drawn from the Food Standards Agency's food hygiene register and located using the ONS postcode directory.
Concretely, that means each listing can tell you:
- the business name as it is registered with its local council
- its address and postcode
- the type of food business the council has registered it as
- its most recent food hygiene rating and the date of that inspection
- which council registered it, and the reference number to check
And it deliberately does not tell you:
- opening hours — these change constantly and stale hours send people on wasted journeys
- what is in stock, or prices
- whether the cafe is any good
- customer reviews, of any kind, from anywhere
I would rather publish a smaller set of facts I can stand behind than a rich page full of things I am guessing at. If you want to know whether the shop is open on a Tuesday in February, the farm's own Facebook page will beat anything I could tell you.
How it makes money
At the moment, it does not. There are no adverts on the site today, no sponsored listings, and no charge to appear or to be removed. If I add advertising later I will say so here, and it will not change which farms are listed or the order they appear in — that ordering is driven by how complete the record is, and nothing else.
No farm has ever paid to be on this site. No farm ever will be able to.
Mistakes
There will be some. The underlying data is a regulatory register, not a shopping directory, so businesses appear under names customers do not use, in categories that do not quite fit, and occasionally in the wrong place because the register only holds a partial postcode. Where I know the location is approximate, the listing says so.
If something is wrong — or if you run one of these businesses and would simply rather not be listed — tell me and I will fix or remove it. No charge, no argument, no form to fill in beyond an email.
Get in touch
Email jack@stackyard.uk. I read everything, though I am often out in a field, so give me a couple of days.
Data on this site was last retrieved on 1 August 2026. Read more about how these listings are built, where the data comes from, and the standards this site holds itself to.