Data sources and licensing
Two open datasets, both public sector, both used within their licence. Here they are in full.
What we use
1. Food Standards Agency — Food Hygiene Rating Scheme
| Source | FSA FHRS open API |
|---|---|
| Licence | Open Government Licence v3.0 |
| Commercial use | Permitted, with attribution |
| What we take | Business name, address, postcode, business type, food hygiene rating, rating date, registering authority, FHRS reference, coordinates |
| Retrieved | 1 August 2026 |
This is the backbone of the site. It covers England, Wales and Northern Ireland under the 0–5 Food Hygiene Rating Scheme, and Scotland under the Food Hygiene Information Scheme, which reports “Pass” or “Improvement Required” instead of a number. Listings label which scheme applies.
2. postcodes.io — ONS Postcode Directory and OS Code-Point Open
| Source | postcodes.io |
|---|---|
| Licence | Open Government Licence v3.0, with Ordnance Survey and Royal Mail copyright acknowledgements |
| What we take | District, county, ward, parish, region, country, latitude and longitude for each postcode |
| Retrieved | 1 August 2026 |
3. Companies House free company data
| Source | Companies House bulk data product |
|---|---|
| Licence | Crown copyright, free to reuse |
| What we take | Company name and number, registered office, company type and status, incorporation date, accounts dates and category, SIC activity codes |
| Scope | Companies with a SIC code in division 01 (crop and animal production), plus farm-named food businesses |
4. Defra and devolved paying agency CAP payments
| Source | CAP payments search and download |
|---|---|
| Licence | Open Government Licence v3.0 |
| Covers | Rural Payments Agency (England), DAERA (Northern Ireland), Scottish Government RPID, Welsh Government |
| What we take | Recipient name, postcode district, town, scheme-level amounts, paying agency |
| Limits | Two financial years only — Defra republishes and removes on a rolling basis. Recipients below the de minimis threshold are anonymised at source and are skipped entirely. |
5. Environment Agency public register — industrial installations
| Source | EA public registers |
|---|---|
| Licence | Environment Agency Conditional Licence — not plain OGL |
| What we take | Permit number, operator name, activity type, site address and postcode, local authority, permission date |
| Relevance | For farms this is mostly intensive pig and poultry units, which need a permit under the Industrial Emissions Directive |
6. Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons
| Source | Wikidata Query Service and Wikimedia Commons |
|---|---|
| Licence | Wikidata is CC0. Commons photographs are individually licensed — the licence and photographer are printed under every image we use |
| What we take | Coordinates, English Wikipedia article link, a two-sentence extract, and the entity photograph where one exists |
| Coverage | Deliberately tiny. Only 20 of our listings match a Wikidata entity closely enough to trust |
7. Farms' own websites
| Source | The businesses' own public websites, found by name and verified by postcode |
|---|---|
| How | Candidate domains from the business name, DNS-checked, then one homepage and at most two contact pages fetched as StackyardBot, honouring robots.txt |
| What we publish | A link, opening hours, a phone number, and flags for things the site mentions |
| What we do not | Their own writing, in original or summarised form, and email addresses |
Facts stated on a public website — that a shop opens on Saturdays, that it has a butchery counter — are facts, and repeating them with a link back to the source is ordinary directory work. Reproducing the prose those facts sit in is not ours to do. Neither is paraphrasing a farm's website closely enough that nobody needs to visit it, which would defeat the point of the directory.
Contact email addresses are collected during that crawl and kept privately. They are not published here. Publishing a few thousand scraped addresses is how harvesting lists are built, and on a farm the business address is frequently a person's own.
About the photographs
Two different things are going on, and the site keeps them clearly apart.
- Photographs on a listing page come from Wikimedia Commons and depict that specific place. They only appear where a listing matched a Wikidata entity on both name and coordinates, so 20 listings have one and roughly 3,000 do not.
- Photographs at the top of a category page are generic pictures of UK farm retail. They are labelled “Illustration only — not a photograph of this business” because that is exactly what they are. We will not put a stock photo of someone else's farm shop on your listing and let it imply we have been there.
Every image carries its photographer, licence and a link back to the source file, as CC BY and CC BY-SA require. Images licensed NonCommercial or NoDerivatives are rejected by the fetching script rather than used and hoped about.
Required attributions
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right. Contains Royal Mail data © Royal Mail copyright and database right. Contains National Statistics data © Crown copyright and database right.
Contains Environment Agency information © Environment Agency and/or database right, used under the Environment Agency Conditional Licence.
Contains Companies House data © Crown copyright. This site is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Companies House, Defra, the Environment Agency, the Food Standards Agency or any local authority.
What we deliberately do not use
As much a part of the method as what we do use:
- Google reviews and ratings. Google's Places policies do not permit caching or republishing review content, so there is none here. We will not build a directory on terms we would have to breach to keep it running.
- Scraped competitor directories. Nothing on this site was lifted from another farm directory.
- OpenStreetMap business data. OSM is excellent, but it is ODbL-licensed and its share-alike terms would propagate into the whole dataset. It is kept out entirely. We link to OSM for maps, which is just a link.
- Land Registry ownership files. The corporate ownership data (CCOD) is free but sits under a restricted licence that forbids direct marketing to proprietors and pushes that restriction onto anyone it is passed to. Linking a title to a specific field also needs paid products. Until both are dealt with properly, there is no land layer here.
- Individuals' names in subsidy data. Defra publishes payments to sole traders and partnerships under names that are personal data. Those records are used for area and scheme totals but the names are never written to a page. Only payments matched to a registered company are shown in full, because a company name is not personal data. The matching rules are here.
- Anything a farm paid us to say. There is no paid placement on this site.
Personal data
Some registered food businesses are sole traders whose business name is their own name. That is personal data, even though the FSA publishes it openly. We publish it because there is a clear public interest in being able to find and check a food business, and because the source is an official public register.
If you are named on a listing and want it gone, you do not have to argue the point with us. Ask, and we will remove it.
Rebuilding this yourself
All of it is reproducible. The FSA API needs no key. postcodes.io needs no
key. The scripts that build this site are three Python files —
harvest.py, classify.py, enrich.py — and
the methodology page documents every filtering rule
they apply.