At Argus Farm Stop on Liberty Street in Ann Arbor, Mich., dry goods like Shoreline Fruit’s dark-chocolate-covered cherries (grown on Lake Michigan) and Omena Organics’s canned navy beans (grown in Omena, Mich.) are tucked near egg and milk refrigerators.
When big box stores reported shortages during the pandemic in 2020, Argus Farm Stop was bustling.
“We had abundance,” said Bill Brinkerhoff, who founded Argus with his wife, Kathy Sample, in 2014.
At first, it was “utter chaos,” Ms. Sample said. The Ann Arbor Farmers Market was shut down, and the market’s manager asked Ms. Sample for help. Farmers’ crops, planted for opening day, were in the lurch. Ms. Sample started working the phones and told growers to bring their excess produce to Argus.
In a few days, the Argus staff set up an online ordering system that offered pickup and delivery. The team rented two walk-in refrigerator units for farmers to seamlessly drop off goods. In the end, the cost and risk paid off. “Our business almost doubled during Covid,” Mr. Brinkerhoff said. Argus’s growth has continued, with nearly $7 million in sales across its three locations in 2024.
Argus and other farm stops, grocery stores stocked only with locally grown and made food, are part of a burgeoning movement to make it easier to shop locally. The idea is to help small farms thrive by offering more favorable margins to small producers than supermarkets do. Half of American farms will change ownership in the next decade, and the industry’s net income was more than 22 percent lower in 2024 than it was in 2022. Food advocates in the United States worry that if small farms aren’t supported by better business models, the next generation might be less inclined to go into the family business.
Farm stops offer one answer. They are “a beautifully simple idea,” said Dan Barber, the chef and co-owner of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns and author of “The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food.” It’s an idea that “throws the supermarket on its head,” he added.
A Hybrid Option
There are subtle cues that Argus is different from a typical grocery store, most of which stock food from an average of 1,500 miles away. Most farm stops source from within 200 miles, with a majority of the fresh produce coming from within 50 miles. Prices are handwritten onto laminated cards printed with a farm’s logo and location. Nearly everything is from Michigan, save for a few exceptions, like Boochy Mama’s Kombucha, from just over the state line in Toledo, Ohio, and Janie’s Mill, an organic flour company in Illinois.
Farm stops offer a hybrid between a farmers’ market and a grocery store, selling a variety of locally grown goods with the convenience of a supermarket, complete with refrigeration, freezers and even vegetable misters. Typically open seven days a week, farm stops receive goods directly from farms, avoiding the grocery store’s complex web of wholesalers and distributors. By cutting out brokers, it gives more money back to growers, which in turn helps keep their farms operating. And by sourcing from a mix of farmers — Argus works with about 300 — farm stops offer more variety than a single farm stand.
Since Argus opened, farm stops have proliferated. A decade ago, there were three in the country. Now there are 18, clustered mostly in the Midwest and on the East Coast. Communities with existing farmers’ markets tend to be most enthusiastic about the addition of farm stops, Ms. Sample noted. These areas tend to have affluent shoppers who have the time for and interest in shopping that way. “Often by the time the rural area has lost their grocery store and dollar store comes in, the population is conditioned to just go for the cheapest,” she said.
The local-first approach can raise eyebrows for unsuspecting shoppers. If customers ask for something that does not grow in Michigan, like a lemon, Ms. Sample tells employees to explain the Argus mission and then offer an alternative, like citric acid, or give directions to a different store.
“Engage them,” Ms. Sample said. “Don’t make them feel stupid, because we were stupid in the beginning.”
Argus’s profit margins are thin. Around 1.8 percent of its $6.9 million in sales was net income, which is similar to a typical supermarket’s profit. But food producers receive 70 percent of the final sale price, versus the grocery store average of 15 percent. (In 2024, Argus paid out $4.4 million to farms and food producers, with the top 75 farms receiving over $44,000, according to the company.)
And that’s all the more meaningful to those partners because small farms in the United States are on the decline amid the expansion of industrial agriculture, growth of megafarms and conglomeration of the grocery store industry. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the country has lost 13 percent of its small farms since 2012. Argus’s founders believe its model can help save at least some of those small farms that are teetering on the edge.
“Argus has allowed us to be a debt-free farm. And that’s huge,” said Lucas Dickerson of Webbed Foot Pines. Operating on 152 acres, the fifth-generation farmer said Argus gave him consistent volume, amounting to around a third of the farm’s total sales.
Spreading the Farm Stop Model
After retiring from corporate careers, Ms. Sample and Mr. Brinkerhoff wanted to start a business that would support local food. The couple, who had no food industry experience but had met at the University of Michigan’s Stephen M. Ross School of Business, thought about farming, or perhaps a restaurant. But when they stopped at the Local Roots Market & Café in Wooster, Ohio, founded in 2009 as what the proprietors say was the first-ever farm stop, Ms. Sample immediately thought, “This could work.”
They invested $160,000 of their own money, plus $10,000 from a third partner, and leased a former gas station, then went from farm to farm across Washtenaw County, Mich., pitching the farm stop model. Some food producers remained reluctant until opening day in August 2014, when there was so much consumer interest that Mr. Brinkerhoff and Ms. Sample had to install an extra register.
Now, “so many of us in town shop at both” the farmers’ market and Argus Farm Stop, said Lisa Young, a teaching professor at the University of Michigan who serves on Ann Arbor’s Public Market Advisory Commission. She might buy lettuce at the Saturday market, but on Monday she “can run down and get arugula or spinach at Argus.”
“It’s good for the local economy,” said Andrew Hoffman, a professor at the Ross School of Business, who uses Argus Farm Stop as a case study on the idea that bigger is not always better for some businesses. He believes “there are dangers to efficiency,” pointing out that bird flu spread via large-scale supply chains.
But large-scale supply chains offer an advantage on pricing. Smaller farms typically charge more to cover their overhead as they operate at a fraction of the volume of a multimillion-dollar agribusiness and often with significantly less federal subsidies. At Argus, some produce is priced only somewhat higher than produce at grocery stores (arugula, for instance, goes for $4 at the Kroger in Ann Arbor and $5 at Argus), while other items can be substantially more: A three-pound bag of flour goes for $9.50 at Argus, and at Kroger a five-pound bag is $6. (Argus’s farmers set their selling prices.)
As Argus grew, Mr. Brinkerhoff and Ms. Sample focused on evangelism. They host a monthly, free one-hour webinar, a three-day online conference and an annual farm stop conference to encourage more people to go into the business.
One Argus acolyte is Abby Hurst, who used to live in nearby Chelsea, Mich., and was working in nonprofits. Local “just makes so much sense from an environmental standpoint and from an economic standpoint,” said Ms. Hurst, who saw gaps in access to fresh food in her community despite living next door to farmers.
In 2019, she co-founded Agricole Farm Stop with three partners and a Michigan Economic Development Corporation grant. “We were all nervous — would this work in a smaller town? Ann Arbor has a lot more resources,” Ms. Hurst said.
But by 2024, they had already doubled their sales goals, taking in more than $2 million in annual sales, similar to other independent grocers in Michigan. Using a 75-25 split model, in favor of the farmers, Agricole has paid out over $5.7 million to local producers since opening.
Americans Want More Local Food, but Not at a Farmers’ Market
The farm stop model aims to “make it more mainstream” for Americans to buy directly from food producers, Mr. Brinkerhoff said. Americans want to eat local food, but they also want it to be convenient.
Since the 1990s, the prevalence of farmers’ markets has more than tripled, according to the U.S.D.A. But direct-to-consumer sales via farmers’ markets have plateaued, which researchers have linked to logistical complications like unreliable supply, seasonality and delivery timing. (Plus, they’re usually open just one or two days a week.) At the same time, spending at farm stores — which include both farm stands and farm stops — has doubled.
“Supermarkets are great if you are a big farmer that produces a lot of homogeneous and aesthetically perfect food,” said Susanne Freidberg, a professor at Dartmouth who studies the social, political and ecological life of food supply chains. “For the smaller, medium-sized farms, the supermarkets are often not an option.”
Washtenaw County, where Argus Farm Stop is, went from having about 1,000 farms in 1999 to 1,255 by 2022, bucking the trend of small farms closing both in Michigan and in the United States. The county is home to 15 farmers’ markets and two farm stops; 18 percent of Washtenaw County farms, which are mostly small, family operations, sell directly to consumers, substantially higher than the 7 percent national average.
Michigan wants to “support these kind of connective tissue pieces of the food system,” said Tim Boring, a director at the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development. In January, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced funding to support farm stops and food hubs, the first grant of its kind. Investing in local food infrastructure doesn’t just give local farms better access to consumers, it helps the downtown areas of cities and towns.
Big-box stores are paying attention to consumer interest in local foods. In the past decade, grocery stores have found ways to work smaller producers into the supply chain.
Rick Stein, vice president of Fresh Foods, FMI — the Food Industry Association, which represents over 40,000 stores including Walmart, Kroger and Whole Foods, estimates that 97 percent of the association’s retail members sell locally produced goods in their stores.
“When you’re buying local at a supermarket, that product is probably as fresh as you can get it, and the volume allows you to keep it fresh,” Mr. Stein argued. “If you’re at a produce stand, you might not have enough volume.”
Where the Farm Stop Falls Short
Some problems remain vexing for Argus, despite its success.
As sales grew, “bottlenecks in our food system” emerged, Ms. Sample said, especially for flours, seed-based oils and meat, products for which consumer demand outpaced local production capabilities.
“If you’re just a small farmer raising cows or pigs” in Michigan, Ms. Sample said, “ you normally have to drive a long ways to get to a U.S.D.A. processing center,” where federal guidelines mandate that all animals are butchered. For smaller producers, that can add a huge cost.
And many farmers are “too busy to participate in the traditional direct to consumer channels,” like farmers’ markets or farm stands, Mr. Brinkerhoff said. Mr. Dickerson, who has quit selling at farmers’ markets since working with Argus, said that about a third of the time markets “financially aren’t worth it. You’d go sit there all day and you made 50 bucks.”
Then there’s the efficiency problem. “We don’t have a single semi-truck backing up with pallets,” Mr. Brinkerhoff said. “All of our food comes through the door, carried by farmers in farm boxes.”
But, he added, “you have to embrace it.”
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