Privacy

Last updated 4 October 2026

Draft, pending legal review. The practices described here are what the software actually does.

The short version: we collect what a marketplace needs to work, we do not sell it, and we do not run advertising. There are no third-party trackers on this site.

What we hold about you

Your account — email address, the name you display, a phone number if you give one, and the tag on the link that brought you, if it carried one (see the launch list, below).
Roughly where you are — town, state and ZIP code, so the site can show farms near you. Given by you; you can leave it out and search by typing a place instead.
Your orders — what you bought, from whom, when, and a delivery address if it was posted.
Messages you send to farms, and anything you write on a dispute or a review.
Photographs you upload. Pictures attached to a dispute are private to you, the farm, and whoever decides it.
Records of what you agreed to — which version of which terms, when, and the address you were at. That record is the reason it is kept: it is what settles an argument later.

The launch list

If you sign up on thepasturemarket.com to hear when farms near you are selling, or for details on selling with us, we keep your email address, the ZIP code you give us, how far from it you want to hear about, which of the two you asked for, and when. If the link that brought you here carried a tag we put on it, such as ?from=card on the cards we hand out at markets, we keep that tag too, so we know which cards, emails and posts reach people. When a farm within that distance starts selling we email you about it once, and keep a note of which farm and when, so that we never tell you about the same one twice. Your ZIP code and distance are used for nothing else. Nothing more is kept: not your name, and nothing worked out from your connection about where you were when you signed up.

We email you once to check the address is yours, and you are not on the list until you click the link in that email. An address that is never confirmed is deleted after 30 days. A confirmed one is used only for what you asked for, and every email we send to the list has a link that takes you off it. Using it deletes your address right away, with the note of which farms we told you about. Resend sends these emails, as it sends all of ours.

What we never see

Card numbers. They go from your browser to Stripe and never touch this site. Nor do we see the identity documents a farm submits — those go straight to Stripe as well, and no photograph of anybody’s license is stored here.

Who else gets it

Four companies, each doing one job:

Stripe — payments, payouts and identity checks. Gets your name, email, order amounts, and card details you enter directly with them.
Resend — sends our email. Gets your address and the contents of the messages we send you.
Sentry — tells us when a page breaks. Gets error reports, deliberately stripped: no cookies, no query strings, no account attached.
Cloudflare — stores uploaded photographs.

Nobody else. We do not sell data, share it for advertising, or hand it to anybody for their own purposes.

What farms see about you

A farm you order from sees your display name, roughly where you are, and a delivery address if you asked for delivery. Never your email address — messages go through the site. If you have failed to collect an order before, farms see that on a new reservation, and you can answer it in your own words.

What buyers see about a farm

A farm’s page shows its town, not its address. That is deliberate: a farm’s coordinates are usually somebody’s home, so the map shows the center of the town instead. A farm can choose to share where visitors should go, an address or a meeting spot, with people who have paid for a place on a tour, class or supper. They see it only on their own Your visits page, until the day after the visit. It is never on the farm’s page, the map, search results or in email.

How long we keep it

Orders, disputes and the records of what was agreed are kept while they could still matter — a card payment can be reversed months later, and the record of what you accepted is the answer. Messages and reviews stay while your account does.

What you can ask for

A copy of what we hold about you, a correction, or deletion. Write to support@thepasturemarket.com. Some things survive a deletion request because we are required to keep them — the record of a completed sale, and anything tied to an unresolved payment dispute.

Cookies

Four, all our own: one for staying signed in, one for what is in your cart, one for the ZIP code or town you search from (kept on this device for a year), and one counting your unread messages. No analytics, no advertising, no third-party cookies. When you pay by card, Stripe, our payment processor, sets its own cookies on that step to help stop fraud. That is why there is no banner asking you to accept anything. A tag on a link you followed waits in your browser tab until you close it, not in a cookie, and reaches us only if you sign up.