01/31/2026
Here’s something I don’t think most people really understand:
scale looks completely different depending on where you’re standing.
If you live in a city, scale is invisible.
Food just shows up. Shelves are full. Prices move around. That’s it.
A “big” operation is just… the system. You don’t see the parts, you don’t see the gaps, and you definitely don’t see what disappears when something breaks.
Now step back one level.
A homesteader thinks scale is five pigs instead of two.
A couple cows instead of one.
Enough food to feed your family, maybe sell a little to friends.
That feels big. It’s real. It’s hands-on. And it’s incredibly important — but it’s not designed to feed a region.
Then you move up again.
Small and regional producers.
This is where things actually start to matter.
These are the people moving dozens, not thousands.
They’re the ones who can pivot, adapt, and keep food moving when the system hiccups.
They use regional processors.
They haul their own animals.
They know their customers.
They’re not invisible — but they’re not massive either.
And that middle layer?
That’s the layer we’re actively eliminating.
On one end, we celebrate the homesteader.
On the other, we defend the corporate system as “efficient” and “necessary.”
But the small and regional producers — the ones that actually create resilience — get squeezed out.
Regulation.
Processing bottlenecks.
Capital requirements.
Logistics that only make sense at massive scale.
So what happens?
We don’t replace small and regional with something better.
We replace them with bigger.
More centralized.
More fragile.
The corporate system absolutely has a role. It has to.
You don’t feed millions of people without it.
But when you eliminate the middle, you lose redundancy.
You lose flexibility.
You lose the ability to absorb shocks.
And when something breaks — disease, weather, labor, fuel, policy — there’s nothing left to catch it.
That’s not nostalgia.
That’s logistics.
Scale isn’t good or bad.
Each level has a job.
But when we sacrifice small and regional producers to feed the corporate machine, we don’t gain efficiency — we trade resilience for convenience.
And eventually, convenience runs out.