CertifiedOrganicDex — USDA Organic Certifications Directory
A complete, browsable map of America's certified organic sector: 39,149 operations searchable by state, product, certification scope or certifying agent.
What CertifiedOrganicDex is
Verifying that a farm or food processor genuinely holds USDA organic certification is possible in theory — the federal register is public — but the raw database was never designed for shoppers, wholesale buyers or journalists. CertifiedOrganicDex turns that register into a human-friendly directory where every certified operation gets its own public profile: certification status, history and certified products, one URL each.
I built and run it as one of my own programmatic-SEO products: tens of thousands of pages generated from official data and structured so that a plain-language query like "organic dairy farms in Wisconsin" lands on a precise answer.
What you can look up
- Full-register search by product name, operation name or location.
- Operation profiles showing certification status, full history and every certified product a farm or handler carries.
- Scope filters across the four certification scopes: crops, livestock, handling and wild crops.
- State browsing, with California on top at 3,498 certified operations, ahead of New York and Pennsylvania.
- ZIP-code proximity search to surface certified operations near any US location.
- Certifier directory covering all 178 accredited certifying agents, plus a stats section and an educational blog.
Directory coverage
The index spans 39,149 certified operations across 52 states and territories, re-synced against the USDA Organic Integrity Database every week. Because the USDA Organic seal follows the product, coverage also reaches certified operations abroad — from Mexico to Peru — that ship into the US supply chain.
Behind California, the heaviest concentrations sit in New York (1,749 operations), Pennsylvania (1,467) and Wisconsin (1,373), and a dedicated data-sources page documents where every number comes from.
Visit certifiedorganicdex.com →
How it is built
Fully custom engineering: a Laravel + PHP backend on a MySQL database tuned to serve tens of thousands of operation pages fast. No themes, no plugins — each page type (operation, state, scope, certifier) is a purpose-built view designed to rank.
A programmatic SEO layer derives titles, meta descriptions, structured data and internal links straight from the dataset, while an automated import pipeline reconciles the entire federal register weekly without manual work.
Where it sits in my portfolio
Nobody commissioned CertifiedOrganicDex — it is entirely my own product, from niche selection and data modelling to code and search strategy. I own the whole cycle that client work usually splits across several vendors.
That independence makes it an honest proving ground: the indexing, performance and information-architecture techniques validated here at real scale are the same ones I bring to the platforms I build for clients.
Directory FAQ
Where does CertifiedOrganicDex get its data?
Everything comes from the USDA Organic Integrity Database, the official public register of organic certifications in the United States. The index is refreshed weekly, and the site is independent — not affiliated with the USDA.
Which certification scopes are covered?
All four: crops, livestock, handling/processing and wild crops, together with the list of certified products attached to every operation.
Can I find certified operations near me?
Yes — browse any of the 52 states and territories, run a text search by operation name or product, or use the ZIP-code proximity finder.
Does a listing show whether the certificate is still valid?
Each operation page displays the current certification status, its history and the accredited certifying agent behind it — 178 agents are indexed in total.