AI and Editorial Technology Policy

United Farmers Market uses AI to help draft articles. Humans direct the work, research and fact-check against primary sources, and review every piece before it publishes. We do not claim interviews, first-hand reporting, or kitchen testing unless a piece says so, and we do not use AI-generated photographs.

How drafting works

Articles begin with an editorial brief: the topic, the audience, the questions the piece must answer, and the sources it must draw from. Drafts are produced with AI assistance under human editorial direction, following our editorial standards and the source order in our sourcing and fact-checking policy. The draft is then fact-checked and copy edited by the editorial team before it can publish.

What humans do

• Decide what we cover and why.
• Set the sources an article may rely on and confirm each was actually consulted.
• Check every legal, numeric, historical, and scientific claim against its recorded source.
• Hold any article that depends on a law, a price, a policy, or a platform feature until a pre-publication review is cleared.
• Copy edit for voice and clarity.
• Choose, license, and credit every photograph.
• Decide when an article needs a correction and write the correction note.

What we never claim

AI assistance makes it easy to produce text that sounds like experience. We are strict about this:

• We do not fabricate quotes, interviews, testimonials, or customer stories.
• We do not invent statistics, laws, deadlines, or dates. If we cannot source a figure, we say so.
• We do not claim first-hand reporting, site visits, or interviews unless a piece explicitly says who did them.
• We do not claim kitchen testing. Recipes are editorial recipes developed from standard reference methods, and the site labels them that way. If a recipe has been tested in a kitchen, the piece will say so.

Photographs

No AI-generated photography is used anywhere on the site. Every photograph is a real photograph from Wikimedia Commons or another source with a verified license: CC0, public domain, CC BY, or CC BY-SA. Before an image is used, our tooling reads the license from the source, rejects anything outside that list, and records the source URL, creator, license, and verification details in a machine-readable registry. Attribution is shown on the page and on image credits.

Bylines

Articles carry the byline United Farmers Market Editorial Team, which describes an editorial process rather than a person. We do not create fictional named authors or attach invented credentials to AI-assisted work. If individual authors join the site, they will be real people with real biographies.

Search and site tools

The site's search runs on an index built from our own content. The newsletter form and any analytics are described in the privacy policy. We do not run AI chat tools, recommendation engines that profile readers, or any third-party scripts beyond optional, cookie-free analytics.

Why we work this way

Our readers make decisions about registrations, labels, and money based on what we publish. AI helps us produce clear drafts quickly. It does not know what your state's agriculture department changed this year, and it will guess confidently if allowed to. The value of the site is in the human checks against primary sources, and that is where the editorial effort goes.

Questions and corrections

If a piece reads as though it claims experience it does not have, or if you believe a fact is wrong, email contact@unitedfarmersmarket.com. See the corrections policy.