Advocates for local foods – from individual consumers to government agencies – rally around the idea that knowing who grew their food and how can be means for enacting social change and improving the environment. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has codified this sentiment by placing a diverse set of the agency's initiatives – from greenhouse cost-shares to grants for beginning farmers – into an umbrella program named “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” (USDA, 2011). USDA has national ambitions with the program, yet the acts of knowing farmers and knowing food vary greatly from farm to farm. In this paper, I provide a way of explaining how they come to be different and argue that demonstrating why they differ should come before judging whether different ways of knowing are positive or negative for social and ecological change. I describe the varied practices that farms perform in order to give their products market value as embedded in a specific socio-ecological context (Hinrichs, 2000). My main point is to advance an awareness of hybridity in local foods institutions (Harris, 2009 and Mount, 2012).