Kentucky is longer than it looks — the Big Sandy to the Mississippi, with the country changing about every eighty miles of it. So we take it a region at a time instead of pretending the whole state farms alike.
The Falls country opened first. Louisville sits on the Ohio, and an hour out of that city does not stay inside one state: ten of the 11 farms in the ring are Kentucky and one is across the river at Borden, Indiana, which is closer to downtown than most of what is listed under it. Every farm carries its real town and its real state.
Most of the ring runs northeast, up US-42 and I-71 through Oldham, Henry and Shelby counties, where the herd shares and the grass-fed beef are. The rest sits south and southwest — Bullitt, LaRue and Meade — and a few of those are a full hour out. We left them in because they come to town: free metro delivery, delivery routes, a CSA with pickups in the city.
A ring is drawn by drive time, not by the state line, and the Louisville one proves it — it crosses the Ohio because that is where the peaches are.
And the standing rule, same on every page of this thing: call or check their own page before you drive out. Nearly all of these places run on the crop, not the calendar.
River bottom on one side of the city and rolling Bluegrass pasture on the other — u-pick apples inside Jefferson County, beef and herd shares up the I-71 corridor, and a choose-and-cut down in Bullitt when it comes December.
One ring so far, drawn about an hour out from downtown in every direction that makes sense to drive — the river included.
Empty today and the next one we mean to draw. Lexington, Frankfort, Paris, Versailles — horse country, with a good deal more produce and dairy tucked in behind the plank fence than the postcards let on.
Farm out that way, or buy from one? Tell us who to call.
West of the Knobs the ground flattens out and the row crops take over — Bowling Green and the cave country, then Owensboro on the river, then the Purchase, out past Kentucky Lake. All of it still to do, and it will take more than one ring to do it right.
Hillside gardens, hollers and market co-ops. That is a different kind of farming and we will not write it up from a desk.
If you keep a place up there, we would rather hear it from you.
Every farm on this page is here because somebody read its own words and wrote them down. If that’s your farm and we got something wrong — or if you’re not on here at all — we want to hear from you. No fee, no ads, no catch.