TL;DR. Kentucky Proud is the marketing program operated by the Kentucky Department of Agriculture, with a public-facing site at kyproud.com. Stream B’s evaluation surfaced a different kind of finding here than for the other four directories in our seeded set: Kentucky Proud does not publish a publicly enumerable producer directory. The site’s only “find” feature is a Google Custom Site Search embed that returns whatever Google has indexed across kyproud.com — it is not a structured member roster. There are no per-producer pages, no pagination of members, no taxonomy of farms by species or county. From a transparency-audit perspective, that’s a structural fact about Kentucky Proud’s information architecture, and arguably the most consequential single finding from our pilot work so far.
About the program
Operator. Kentucky Department of Agriculture, through the Kentucky Proud marketing program.
Type. State agency-operated brand and marketing program.
Geography. Kentucky statewide.
Approximate size. Kentucky Proud’s program literature describes thousands of member businesses, but the membership roster is not published as a directory on the public site. Members are referenced individually in news posts, recipe features, and program announcements, but not enumerated as a searchable database.
Root URL. kyproud.com.
What we found instead of a directory
Kentucky Proud’s /find page presents a single search input box. When the user submits a query, the site returns Google Custom Site Search results from kyproud.com — effectively, “search the Kentucky Proud website for the word X.” That mechanism returns whatever pages Google has indexed that contain the search term — news articles, recipes, program pages — not a curated list of members.
There is no member directory under any URL pattern we tested, including /find, /directory, /members, /farms, /find-a-farm, or via the WordPress sitemap (the site uses a custom non-WordPress framework, so no WordPress sitemap exists). The kyproud.com homepage links describe the program (“About Membership,” “Member FAQs”) and announce member events (“Farm to Fork,” “Farms Are Fun”), but do not link to a member roster or category-archive page.
What this means in Stream B terms
Kentucky Proud is not a producer directory in the sense Stream B uses the term. It is a marketing program with a member roster, where the roster lives in the program’s internal database and surfaces publicly only when individual members are featured in program content. From a consumer-discovery perspective that’s an unusual choice — most state-grown programs (including Abundant Montana, Minnesota Grown, and Georgia Grown) operate a public directory at least partly because the entire point of “buy local” branding is to help consumers find local producers.
Three plausible reasons Kentucky Proud might have made this choice:
- The program’s primary value to members is the right-to-use the “Kentucky Proud” trademark on packaging and signage, and individual-member discoverability is delegated to existing distribution channels (grocery stores, farmers markets, restaurants).
- The roster is large enough that publishing it would be operationally expensive to maintain (the AGW staleness problem at scale).
- The program treats the roster as proprietary membership data rather than public information.
Stream B does not have visibility into which of these is the actual reason. What we can say from the public-facing artifact alone is that the structural opportunity for transparency disclosure that the other four directories provide — a per-producer page where the producer can describe their practices, name their products, link their website, and (in some cases) declare certifications — does not exist publicly on kyproud.com.
Stream B’s evaluation approach for Kentucky Proud
Without a public member directory, Stream B’s standard methodology cannot run. The 15-category rubric scores producer-side disclosure as captured on a directory listing plus the producer’s own website. With no listing to score, four out of fifteen categories are structurally Missing for every producer in the program (Farm/Ranch identity at the directory level, Sales channels, the soft welfare/feed/antibiotic narrative producers might write into a listing description, and the certifications-tag field), regardless of what individual producers might publish on their own sites.
Two adjacent paths Stream B could pursue, deferred to a later iteration:
- Member-discovery via individual mentions. Build a corpus of all Kentucky Proud members named in program news posts, recipe features, and event announcements over the past several years; treat that as a partial roster; then evaluate each named member’s own website. This would surface the more public-facing members but underrepresent the (probably much larger) silent membership.
- Operator-side data request. Approach the Kentucky Department of Agriculture program staff to request a research-grade member list. Several state ag programs maintain such lists internally and provide them to academic or journalism partners on request.
Both paths are feasible but neither is in scope for this iteration of the pilot.
Status
Evaluation deferred; the structural finding above is the publishable result of this iteration. The Stream B series will return to Kentucky Proud once one of the two adjacent paths above is operationally feasible — most likely the operator-side data request, since the alternative path of harvesting member mentions from program content is labor-intensive and produces a biased sample.
Sources
- Kentucky Proud program — kyproud.com (consumer-facing).
- Kentucky Department of Agriculture — program operator.
See the Stream B methodology for the full rubric and the four verification-ceiling tiers.
Last reviewed: 7 May 2026 — evaluation deferred; structural finding (Kentucky Proud does not publish an enumerable directory) is the result of this iteration.