Editorial Standards

This page describes how articles on United Farmers Market are made and what you can expect from them. In short: we research from official and primary sources, every piece is reviewed before it publishes, anything that depends on a law, a price, or a product feature is held until a reviewer clears it, and we say plainly what we do not know.

What we are trying to do

Our readers are making decisions with real money and real legal exposure: whether to register a cottage food business, what to put on a label, how to price a loaf, which market to apply to. Our job is to give them accurate, sourced answers in plain language, and to be honest when the answer is "it depends on your state" or "we could not find a reliable figure."

Sourcing

We research before we write, and we prefer primary sources in roughly this order: state agencies, statutes, and administrative codes; USDA and FDA; university extension programs; the Farmers Market Coalition and official state market associations; local governments; reputable industry research; companies' own pricing and help pages; and credible journalism.

Every legal, regulatory, numeric, historical, or scientific claim in an article is tied to a source listed at the end of that article, with the date we read it. We do not state a dollar cap, a fee, a statute section, or a percentage without a source we actually opened. The full rules are in the sourcing and fact-checking policy.

The process

Each article moves through the same stages:

1. Research from the sources above, recorded with access dates.
2. Drafting in our own words, from our understanding of the sources, not by copying them.
3. Fact-check pass, in which claims are checked against the recorded sources and the source list is confirmed.
4. Copy edit for clarity and house style.
5. Image licensing review, confirming the photograph's license and attribution against our image registry.
6. Publication gate. Articles about laws, prices, policy, or platform features carry a pre-publication review requirement and cannot go live until that review is cleared. If the clearance is missing when the scheduled date arrives, the article stays hidden.

Every article displays a "reviewed" date, which is the date its facts were last checked, and an "updated" date when the text has changed since it first published.

Regulatory content

Cottage food law changes often and varies by state. Articles on regulatory topics say so and carry a standard notice that the content is informational rather than legal advice. Readers should confirm requirements with the official agency, which we link. Our state guides list the governing statute, the responsible agency, and official resources for each state, and each guide shows its own reviewed date.

What we do not do

• We do not fabricate quotes, interviews, testimonials, customer stories, statistics, laws, or dates.
• We do not claim kitchen testing, first-hand reporting, or site visits unless a piece says so explicitly.
• We do not use AI-generated photographs. See the AI and editorial technology policy.
• We do not run advertising or sponsored content, and we do not use affiliate links. See the advertising and sponsorship policy and the affiliate disclosure.

Recipes

Recipes on the site are editorial recipes developed from standard reference methods, and the site labels them that way. They are not represented as kitchen-tested unless the piece says so. Any preservation or canning statement cites the National Center for Home Food Preservation or USDA.

Independence

United Farmers Market is funded through its relationship with Local Cottage Foods, a related business built by the same team. We recommend Local Cottage Foods when readers need a cottage-food ecommerce platform. Articles must still provide useful information on their own, and factual claims must be sourced.

Bylines

Articles carry the byline United Farmers Market Editorial Team. We do not invent named journalists. If individual authors are added, they will be real people with real biographies.

Corrections

When we get something wrong, we fix it and, for anything material, we note the correction on the article with the date. Write to contact@unitedfarmersmarket.com. The corrections policy has the details.