East Gainesville has long been recognized as a food desert. After years of failed attempts to bring another grocery store to the area, a new solution is on the table — a Farm Stop.
Alachua County Commissioner Anna Prizzia introduced the model, which is a combination of a grocery store and farmers market, at a special county commission meeting Feb. 3.
“It would help with fresh food access, it would help with community foods systems and it would help with our local food economy,” Prizzia said at the meeting.
The commission passed a motion to add the Farm Stop discussion to the next city and county joint meeting.
The model
According to Kathy Sample, the co-founder of Argus Farm Stop in Michigan, you need three things to make a Farm Stop: farmers, an interested leadership team and a good location.
“It's a growing movement and it is a far cry from the industrial food system,” Sample said. “It only happens when people who care about this kind of thing want to start something like this.”
Farm Stops are an everyday, year-round farmers market in a brick-and-mortar building, she said. Farmers can sell their products through a shared cash register, just like a grocery store, and customers are able to identify which farmers they’re shopping from and their growing practices.
Farm Stops are stocked with anything participating farmers bring in to sell — ranging from locally grown fruits and vegetables, bakery goods, dairy and meat products. The farmers don’t need to be at the store in person to profit either — they simply leave their goods on the shelf.
The Argus Farm Stop follows a consignment model, Sample said, where the store gets a percentage of the profit to go toward running the store, and the farmers get the rest.
Sample and her husband founded Argus Farm Stop in 2014 as a solution to getting fresh produce every week. Between taking care of her children and working a full-time job, she said they couldn’t make it to the farmers market every week.
“There's too many people who would shop from local farms, but they just don't have the right schedule,” Sample said. “People don't shop one day a week between the hours of seven and three.”
After drawing inspiration from a Farm Stop model store in a small Ohio town, Sample and her husband started one in their hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Now, they operate three Farm Stops and lead workshops and a yearly conference to help other communities start their own.
If plans move forward with the east Gainesville Farm Stop, she said, it would be the first one she knows of in Florida.
Roadblocks
East Gainesville's lack of access to fresh food has been a discussion point among local leadership for over a decade.
Prizzia said one of the factors why the city hasn’t been able to attract a for-profit grocery store to east Gainesville is because there aren’t enough households to make it economically viable.
The City of Gainesville has tried to bring in a grocery store before, but a $3.3 million incentive didn’t nail down a deal. There was a close call in 2022 when a Bravo grocery store looked to set up shop in the area, but the city commission voted against it because city staff found there was “little evidence to provide confidence that this project would be successful,” according to meeting minutes.
East Gainesville is difficult to redevelop because there aren’t a lot of other attractions in the area, Prizzia said, which is why the city and county have focused on adding those developments, like a clinic and bus depot in the works, to revitalize it.
She said a possible location for the Farm Stop is Cornerstone on Hawthorne Road, a redevelopment project already underway.
The next step to move forward is a meeting with the City of Gainesville, she said.
“We know that they’ve supported local food systems and that they’re really committed to trying to figure out better food access for east Gainesville,” Prizzia said. “So hopefully they’ll like this idea and we’ll be able to move forward.”
The Farm Stop model goes beyond helping people without access to fresh produce. It supports local food systems, she said, and farmers who are looking to expand their market.
"We can better connect our local farms to the people who need food the most,” Prizzia said.
The farmers’ side
Alachua County conducted a farmers market need assessment last year, which considered both vendors and shoppers’ needs. One of the most common challenges to making it to the farmers market was the hours not fitting into people’s schedules, as more than 40% of the shopper respondents reported. Nearly a quarter of respondents said another challenge is that the farmers market locations are too far from work or home.
On the farmers’ side, 45% reported opportunities to sell at new markets or during expanded days and hours would benefit them, and 41% reported low customer turnout is a challenge at the farmers market.
Paul Miller, co-owner of Rainbow Star Farm in Newberry, sells produce at the Alachua County farmers market on top of selling wholesale to organic growers. He said because Rainbow Star Farm isn’t very big, he and his wife usually sell out of their produce Saturday mornings.
Carrying off a farm stop model will be a lot of work, he said, but he sees why not everyone can make it to the farmers market every week.
“ You've got to want to come here,” Miller said. “That's a chore. I mean, it's Saturday. You got a lot of things to do.”
Farther down the market, Nicholas Mattia stood selling quail eggs for 7th Heaven Homestead, a family farm. The family usually sells the eggs at one or two farmers markets a week, he said.
A Farm Stop model is a nice way to support local vendors and expand their market, Mattia said, and the family farm would be interested in exploring the opportunity.
But, he said, the model loses some of the special farmers market elements.
“The personal face-to-face selling definitely gets lost when you give your products to a store,” he said.