Three Leelanau County Establishments Land 'Farm Stop' Grants From MDARD

The Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (MDARD) has announced grants to seven farm stops throughout the state of Michigan, totaling $342,000.

Three of those businesses are right here in Leelanau County.

The grants come from MDARD’s “Food Hubs and Farm Stops” program, launched earlier this year as part of the department’s new Farm to Family initiative. Described as “the state’s first-ever program aimed at strengthening Michigan’s middle-of-the-supply-chain agri-food systems,” Food Hubs and Farm Stops seeks to drive growth and vibrancy in local food systems by supporting different parts of the agricultural supply chain.

Lakeview Hill Farm, Lively NeighborFood Market, and 9 Bean Rows – all Leelanau County operators – will collectively pull down nearly $150,000 from MDARD thanks to the latest round of grants, which focus specifically on farm stops.

Described in MDARD materials as “markets that support small-scale farmers and strengthen local and regional food systems,” farm stops “offer a year-round, every day, retail-style market where consumers can buy local produce from farmers or producers, typically on the consignment model.” The farm stop model helps afford “flexibility and a fair price to producers who can sell more products with less of the time commitment required to attend weekend farmers markets,” and allows farmers to “retain a higher percentage of profits compared to a conventional retail model.”

Jim Lively, owner of the Maple City-based Lively Holdings, says he’s pleased to see MDARD embracing the farm stop model. Last year, Lively launched his own farm stop, called Lively NeighborFood Market, aiming to replicate the example set by Ann Arbor’s Argus Farm Stop. Rather than operating like a traditional farm stand, a smaller market where farmers typically only sell goods from their own farm, the shelves at Argus Farm Stop are filled with produce, meat, cheese, and other products from farmers from throughout the Ann Arbor area.

“They’ve been operating for 10 years, and they describe their model as an ‘every-day, year-round farmers market,'” Lively says of Argus. “Their intent is to support as many of the local farms in their region as they can.”

With the NeighborFood Market, Lively wanted to build a similar concept.

“A local farm, for us, is a farm that's willing to drive their produce to us,” Lively says. “That way, we're essentially able to remove the distribution element, because we're only working with farms that are in our community, and we're then selling food mostly to people from our community. That’s our mission, is to keep the food system local. And that's how I see farm stops generally working.”

Through the MDARD grant program, Lively Holdings is getting $50,000 to put toward growing the NeighborFood Market. A year in, Lively tells The Ticker the market is still operating “basically as a startup.” The infusion of capital from MDARD should help move things beyond that stage.

“[Getting everything up and running] was more expensive than I anticipated, so we came into our first year with maybe not quite as much capital reserves to do all the things we wanted to do to put forward the best market we could,” Lively says. “This grant is going to help us add some equipment. We’ve been using used refrigerators and freezers, some of which are breaking and some of which aren’t the right size. We want some things that are a little larger.”

Beyond equipment, Lively has some of the grant money earmarked for marketing (“We want to talk to our community better and let them know about the farms we're working with,” he says) and another portion for bringing some “non-local but still Michigan-based products” to his shelves. 

“There are Michigan vendors [that make those things], but we have to find that food,” Lively says. “And in some cases, it's not just going to come on a truck, because there may not be a distributor moving west Michigan-made pasta from Kalamazoo to the Traverse City area. So, we're developing workarounds. It all takes time, and in some cases, they have minimum orders that we just couldn't afford. So, this gives us money to grow that side of our inventory.”

It's a similar story at Lakeview Hill Farm, which will receive $49,992 to grow the market it opened in the old Pleasant Valley Schoolhouse two years ago. According to farm co-owner John Dindia, the grant will allow for the purchase of more cold storage, so the market can “sell more produce and agricultural goods from other local farms.” While the grant is for Lakeview Hill Farm, Dindia stresses that it will have a positive impact on the local agricultural scene as a whole.

“Over 50 percent of the raw agricultural products sold in the market come from other farms, and we like it that way,” Dindia says. “We've even decreased the amount of crops we produce, because we think it's good to support other farms that do a better job at growing certain things than we do. It just makes sense to let them do that, and then we can focus on what we're good at.”

Dindia says Lakeview Hill Farm has pulled back on crops like beets, carrots, turnips, radishes, winter squash, watermelons, and sweet corn since launching the market. “We really focus mostly on leafy greens now,” he explains. “That’s where our specialty is, along with cucumbers and tomatoes.”

Over half of the grant to Lakeview Hill Farm will go toward a new walk-in cooler, “which is over double the size of our existing one,” Dindia says. That installation should be complete sometime this fall. Other grant dollars will enable the purchase of “an additional freezer;” so that the market can store and stock “more frozen meat from local farms.”

“We're really trying to uplift our entire agricultural community,” Dindia says. “That's really been the driving reason for the whole market itself. And these grant funds will help us do that.”

9 Bean Rows proprietor Nic Welty could not be reached for this article. Per MDARD, though, that farm is receiving $49,000 for “food storage equipment, supplies, and installation fees to expand refrigerated storage and merchandising capacity.” The expansion will help 9 Bean Rows “increase the volume of Michigan-grown products sold to consumers and increase purchases of local products for internal use in value-added bakery and cafe products. The project will also add capacity for fresh, perishable items to be sold through their after-hours marketplace, which currently carries only shelf-stable products.”

MDARD earlier this year announced eight “food hub” grants through the Farm to Family program, including $50,000 to the Leelanau-based MI Farm Cooperative.