Why small is not a strategy

The change needed to transform our food system to be socially and ecologically viable needs to move beyond the artisan and the marginal to be effective, argues Col Gordon.

Across the UK agroecological food projects are multiplying. Market gardens, micro-dairies, seed libraries, food forests, community farms. They’re beautiful, hopeful, and often brilliant acts of care. They teach us what food can be when it’s rooted in soil, skill, and community. They offer a glimpse of a different kind of future. 

For the past fifteen years, I’ve worked alongside regenerative growers, landworkers, and food enterprises committed to transforming how we relate to the land. I’ve seen ideas once dismissed as fringe become not only visible but increasingly embraced. This shift hasn’t happened by accident. It’s the result of people who took risks, built by hand, and proved what’s possible when land is tended with skill and imagination. These projects are not just farms; they’re lighthouses. They’ve laid the groundwork for everything that follows. They are beautiful.

But beauty alone doesn’t build security. A thousand bright fragments don’t currently add up to make a system.

Many of these projects exist on the margins. They are often economically fragile, logistically isolated, and can be reliant on off-farm income, precarious labour, or overstretched volunteers. Not because the people behind them lack vision or commitment, but because the wider systems they operate in weren’t built to support them. 

Too often, we treat small-scale growing and beautiful agroecological projects as if they’re a strategy. They’re not. They’re examples. They’re placeholders. They’re very necessary models showing the future we want. But they are not a plan for how to get us to this future. 

If we’re serious about scaling up agroecology, then we need to think beyond the farm gate. 
And let me name the challenge as I see it: Finding ways to transition millions of acres and hectares to ecological, regenerative food production while ensuring that the food that’s grown becomes the go-to food that feeds everyone affordably and reliably. This is the stage we need to be at now. The scale of the challenge is enormous, and the scale of our ambition must be its equal. To make this a reality we need public infrastructure, logistics, aggregation, and distribution, territorial planning, appropriate financing, and democratic governance that matches the scale and complexity of the task ahead. 

This isn’t about scaling beautiful examples. It’s about building the systems that would make agroecology the default, not the exception.

To get there, we need more than vision—we need an adequate theory of change. One that accounts for power, infrastructure, and political economy. One that moves us beyond replication toward transformation. 

Smallness is not a strategy. It’s a condition

For decades, “Small is Beautiful” has been a guiding principle in the food movement. Borrowed from E.F. Schumacher’s 1973 book of the same name the phrase, paradoxically, was never just about size. It was about appropriateness. It was about matching scale to human need and ecological context. Schumacher was advocating for systems designed with care, constraint, and interdependence in mind, not endless growth.

 

But something has gone wrong in the afterlife of that idea. Today, smallness is often treated not as a condition to be supported, but as a strategy. A moral position. An aesthetic. An ideal. A vision of transformation that centres the lone grower, the ten-acre dream, the hand tool, the hedgerow.

These images are powerful, and they carry real dignity. They offer alternatives to industrial alienation. Spaces of agency, skill, care, and of ecological repair. But structurally, they remain marginal. And too often, we ask them to carry a burden they were never designed to bear. Even community growing initiatives, while vital for social and ecological repair, cannot carry the burden of food system transformation alone. They offer reconnection, resilience, and healing. But they are not systems for mass nourishment. They were never meant to be.

This isn’t a criticism of small farms or gardens. It’s a recognition of their limits and a challenge to the way we’ve come to fetishise smallness as if it were, in itself, a plan.

Smallness is not a strategy. It’s a condition. And continuing to mistake it for a plan will hold the agroecology movement back. At a food systems transformation level, “how to survive as a small farm” or “how to inspire others” are no longer adequate questions. They’re the questions we’ve asked – and answered in countless ways – for at least 50 years. But agroecology is still operating on the fringes of the food system.

The questions now need to be bolder. How to transition land – millions of acres of land – out of extractive agriculture and into agroecology. How to do that while feeding people affordably, accessibly. And how to do that without outsourcing the damage to someone else’s soil, someone else’s labour, someone else’s climate.

This is the core provocation we need to be asking now: How do we transition millions of acres into agroecology while feeding people affordably and without offshoring the harm?

Agroecology can’t scale without structure. Creating more farmers, or even more small farms, doesn’t build a food system. Without the surrounding infrastructure, those farms remain isolated. Their potential is stranded. We don’t just need growers. We need a system that can hold what they grow.

We need systems, not saints

One of the most persistent myths in agriculture is the idea of the heroic farmer: the lone grower, working close to the land, beholden only to the weather and the soil. It’s a powerful image and for many, it’s what draws them to farming in the first place. The promise of autonomy. The dignity of self-reliance.

But that promise rarely holds. Nearly every decision on a farm is shaped by systems far beyond the farm gate: Market specifications, fuel prices, climate extremes, geopolitics, planning regulations, or the simple absence of processing infrastructure. These forces don’t just influence decisions they define the margins of possibility. And yet the myth endures. 

Agroecology is not about heroism. It’s about ecology. And ecology is never individual. It’s networks. Relationships. Reciprocal systems of mutual dependence. Agroecology can flourish not when individuals push harder, but when infrastructure holds them. That means grain mills, abattoirs, dairies, bakeries, cold stores, distribution routes, processing hubs, seed banks, and shared tools for logistics and storage.

It also means shared governance – democratic food boards, territorial planning bodies, and cooperative supply chains that distribute power as well as produce.

We need scale. Not in the industrial sense of bigness for its own sake, but in the sense of sufficiency – enough land, enough food, enough coordination to nourish everyone well. Not just the already converted. Or, as Schumacher was advocating for, appropriateness. Finding the appropriate scale to deal with the challenges at hand. Enough scale for peer-to-peer learning, for collective grain cleaning, for regional processing. Enough scale for connection. Enough scale to be able to create new systems to replace the ones that we say are broken.

If agroecology is going to feed the many, not just the few, it can’t rest on the shoulders of saints who are looked upon for miracles. It must be built as a system. A public system.

What scaling agroecology would take

If small farms alone aren’t enough, then what is? At minimum – infrastructure, coordination, and public intent.

Because we can’t simply scale through multiplication. More isolated, individual small farms will not shift the needle. We need to scale by creating joined-up, coordinated and planned systems. And right now, those systems are largely missing within the movement. Without this infrastructure, even the most skilled and principled grower can only feed a fraction of the eaters that we need to reach. Unless we can somehow bring these new systems into being we will always be operating from the margins of the food system we are trying to change. 

The key unit of transformation then is not the individual farm. It’s the foodshed. The scale at which growing, processing, and eating come back into coherence. That’s where circularity becomes possible. That’s where agroecology can become a real system. But to get there, we must move beyond smallholder romanticism. 

The transition to agroecology cannot rely solely on small farmers or ten-acre dreams. Large-scale farmers must be part of this shift too. And this cannot and will not happen just by being moral encouragement but will only happen when these farmers are structurally enabled. This means designing and implementing local supply chains that make ecological production viable at scale. Larger farms often have the land base, labour, and equipment to transition significant acreage but what they lack is the infrastructure and guarantee. They lack viable options to supply into beyond the global commodity trade.

Make it viable, not exceptional

The dominant models for small-scale agroecology in the UK are based on niche market logic. Whether it’s the mobile pastured poultry system, the veg box CSA, or the heritage grain bakery – most are designed around low-volume, high-value sales. Direct-to-consumer, local loyalty, brand identity. These systems can work brilliantly. They produce high-quality food, cultivate skill, and restore land.

But they are structurally fragile, not because the growers or food producers are failing, but because the models were never meant to carry broad-scale food security. They are designed to succeed at low density. If two growers run CSAs in a small town, both might thrive. If twenty do, the market saturates. There aren’t enough high-income, values-driven customers to go around.

These systems aren’t scaling not because they lack quality or commitment, but because they’re structurally mismatched with the realities of the wider food economy. Most people don’t buy food at farmers’ markets. They buy it through supermarkets, corner shops, emergency food providers, etc, etc. That’s where the calories flow. And this is where agroecology must go.

This is not to say the goal is to abandon direct-to-consumer models. I’m not saying the goal is to organise to supply Tesco. But I am saying we need to create appropriate infrastructure that be able to reach many, not just few. There needs to be a middle ground between the CSA and Tesco. We need a system where growing regeneratively, processing regionally, and feeding publicly is not a heroic exception, but a normal option. That means building procurement pipelines, logistics systems, and public kitchens that agroecology can actually plug into. Because unless agroecology can fulfil the role that the dominant system plays it will remain marginal. No matter how good or how green the farms are.

Planning for Nourishment

Agriculture is already one of the most heavily subsidised sectors in the UK. Each year, around £3–4 billion of public money flows to landowners and farmers. More than any other private industry. But what are we getting in return?

We’re not getting food security. We’re not getting ecological restoration. We’re not getting nourishment embedded in daily life. Instead, public money props up an extractive model geared toward exports, speculation, and commodity production, while most of the food we eat is imported, processed, and disconnected from the land it comes from.

This isn’t just a market quirk. It’s a systemic failure. We don’t lack land, growers, or ecological knowledge. We lack the infrastructure, procurement pipelines, and coordinated mandates that would make nourishing, locally grown food a normal part of life.

Take bread. In Scotland, very close to 0% of the wheat grown here is used to make bread. That means nearly all the bread we eat is made from imported grain, despite the fact that Scottish land can grow more than enough wheat. The missing piece isn’t just agronomy. It’s infrastructure. Regional mills, flour blending facilities, storage, logistics, appropriately sized and funded bakeries and procurement systems that could transform the wheat we grow into bread with mass appeal. There is no system in place that gives Scotland any form of wheat security. We grow wheat. We eat bread. But the system connecting the two is missing.

This is a textbook example of structural misalignment. Growers can’t make the transition to regenerative crops without somewhere to send them. Larger farmers – who currently manage most agricultural land – are often willing to change, but they lack guaranteed markets and viable supply chains. They have no obvious routes into agroecological systems. Smaller growers, meanwhile, are isolated in niche markets with little room or capacity to scale. The result is that most eaters have no way to access agroecologically grown foods, never mind at affordable prices.

This is where public planning must step in.

Because if we’re serious about transitioning land into agroecology and feeding people well, we need to stop treating farming and food as separate systems. We need to treat agroecology as infrastructure. That means territorial planning, coordinated investment, localised procurement, shared and appropriately sized processing facilities, public food boards and democratic governance to oversee it all.

None of this is utopian. The elements already exist in fragmented pockets. What’s missing is integration and scale. We now need to work out how to bring them together.

Beyond the Small Farm Dream

We are not short of pioneers. Regenerative growers, landworkers, and community food projects have shown us what’s possible. They have often done this with no support, little money, and against the odds. They have seeded the imagination of a different food system.

But to make these proven methods the norm, we need to imagine differently. Agroecology can’t scale through examples alone. It needs structure. It needs to be made viable, not exceptional. If we want land use to change at the speed and scale that is necessary, we must rewire the infrastructure beneath it. And to do so we’ll need to address not just the farming methods, but storage, processing, procurement, and planning.

The goal is not to industrialise agroecology or roll it out via a top-down dictatorship. The goal is to make it ordinary. To make it the system that feeds us. That means designing for mass participation. That means building structures where both small and large farms can thrive. Where food is grown for people, not just for price. Where care is scaled through cooperation, not competition.

What’s needed now is not another spotlight on the heroics of individual farmers. What’s needed is bold, joined-up public systems: where farming is treated as part of food; where infrastructure is public, purposeful, and accountable; and where public money delivers public nourishment. The small farm dream showed us what’s possible. But to feed everyone, every day, we need a food system built to hold that dream. We need it to be ordinary. We need it to be public. We need it to be how we feed each other.