Think about how pleasant it is to pop by the farmers market on a Saturday morning—making small talk with folks in line about the weather or a weird looking radish, picking up some sweet corn for dinner, maybe splurging on a bundle of fresh flowers to set out on the table.
Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a farmers market you could visit any time? One that wasn’t open seasonally, or on weekend mornings, but consistently, any time you needed a jug of milk or a bunch of sprouts for your salad?
Well it turns out there is. Welcome to the farm stop.
In Ann Arbor, Michigan, a bright-yellow market called Argus Farm Stop has served as a model for this growing movement. Since 2014, Argus has stocked its shelves with locally produced fruits, vegetables, grains, eggs, and dairy items. Most of its goods are sourced from within 200 miles, with the bulk of its produce coming from fewer than 50 miles away.
“They’re working to grow the local food economy, and they’ve been successful in that,” says Minneapolis’s Lily Gross, who grew up in Ann Arbor. “Washtenaw County, which is where they’re located, is now the No. 1 county in Michigan in terms of introduction of new produce farms.”
Argus has also been successful as a blueprint for other farm stops; when it opened, there were just three in the country, and, today, there are 26, according to the Farm Stop Conference. Soon, Minneapolis will get a farm stop of its own thanks to Gross, who’s working to open Radish Farm Stop in Southwest (5357 Penn Ave. S.) this spring.
Gross says she’s been passionate about food system issues “for as long as I can remember.” About four years ago, she started managing the Seward Community Co-op produce department, where she learned as much as she could about retail and local food systems.
Local markets and co-ops might work with small farms, but the model is different from a farm stop. At a traditional grocery store, the buyer purchases goods from the farmer wholesale, then marks those goods up however much they want—not inherently a bad practice, but “it creates this smoke and mirrors, where you don’t really know what the true cost of food is,” Gross says.
The farm stop model is more collaborative. Products are sold on consignment, and the food producer sets the price and gets a percentage from each sale. And that figure is known to customers.
“We’re working in tandem to help one another succeed; it’s not quite as transactional,” Gross says. “We’re really stewards of the products on their behalf.”
At Radish, everything on shelves will be sourced locally, with nearly every item purchased directly from producers. The threshold for “local” here is roughly 250 miles from the Twin Cities, but often goods, especially produce, will arrive from much closer—one way to think about it might be “driving distance” from Minneapolis-St. Paul.
“Our tagline is ‘know your farmer, know your food.’ With every producer, it’s about getting to know them, understanding what they’re about, what their values are, and then communicating those to consumers,” Gross says. “When they deliver, we treat them like a celebrity—introduce customers to them, say, ‘Hey, Farmer Joe is here dropping off radishes, if anyone has any questions.’”
Gross found the Radish space on Penn Avenue in September, and construction is already underway; she’s hoping to open this spring. (In the meantime, you can follow Radish’s progress on Instagram.) The space boasts wide windows, and there's space out front for a patio where people will be able to enjoy their coffee during the warm months. Oh yeah, did we mention that Radish will also have a coffee shop? (The coffee won’t be grown in Minnesota, of course, but will be locally roasted by Backstory in St. Paul.)
Gross is currently bringing on producers, a time-intensive process that’s made somewhat simpler thanks to relationships she formed during her time at Seward Coop. Currently, more than 30 producers have applied and been onboarded, but she’s hoping to have up to 60 between produce, dairy, meats, dry goods, and packaged grocery items.
“What I’d really like in the long term is for Radish to be an incubator of sorts,” Gross says, a place that supports emerging producers with farmers market experience who are hoping to scale up to sell to coops or other larger grocers before they “graduate.”
And if that all sounds kind of complicated… well, it is! There is a reason most traditional grocery stores don’t do things this way—it’s much easier to get daily deliveries from a warehouse than it is to work with dozens of different local farms and producers.
“Having these direct producer relationships is more time-intensive,” Gross admits. “You have to be really clever about it. You have to be really organized.”
“But with that, I see a lot of opportunity,” she continues, “and a way to engage people and create a space that’s rooted in community in a way that I don’t feel like I see as much as I’d like to.”
