A farm stop in Ann Arbor, Mich., has found success with its local-first approach. But is the model replicable?
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.