Missouri keeps its two big cities at opposite corners and puts a state line under both of them. That is the whole shape of this page: the country where the rivers meet on one end, the border counties on the other, and a long way of farm ground still to work through between.
The Confluence opened first — St. Louis, St. Charles County, the Missouri River towns out toward Augusta, and the Illinois bottoms across the water. Eleven farms in that ring, seven of them in Missouri and four in Illinois, because Edwardsville and Belleville are closer to downtown than a fair piece of Missouri is.
The Western Border is open now too. Thirteen farms around Kansas City — ten in Missouri, three over in Kansas — running from the Platte Purchase country up at Weston and Platte City down through Belton and Adrian. Twenty-four farms between the two rings, every one of them read off its own website or Facebook page before it went in.
A ring is drawn by drive time, not by the state line. Both of Missouri’s cities sit on one, so both rings cross — St. Louis into Illinois, Kansas City into Kansas. A farm carries the state it is actually in, not the state of the city it is near.
And the standing rule, on every page of this thing: call or check their own page before you drive out.
Where the Missouri runs into the Mississippi — river-bottom ground, the German towns out Highway 94 toward Augusta, and apples on places two families have held since the 1830s and 1850s.
One ring so far, drawn an hour out from the city in every direction it makes sense to drive — and in this corner that means both sides of the river.
The border counties, where the fall crop carries the calendar: six pumpkin patches, six u-pick orchards, and a sheep creamery up at Weston where you can sit down and eat what the milk turned into.
One ring so far, and it is the apple-and-pumpkin end of the state — pick your direction out of town before you pick your Saturday.
Farther out — St. Joseph, Warrensburg, the Osage plains — comes next, one ring at a time.
Still empty. Springfield and the hill country south of it farm on rock and slope, and we are not going to write it up until we have read the places themselves. Little Dixie around Columbia and the Bootheel down in the delta are behind it in line.
Know the country down there? Tell us who to call.
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.