A Thousand Small Shops

When my family and I moved to our farm, it was an astonishing moment in our lives.

We had land.

We had gone from a one-acre lot on the edge of town to twenty-four acres with generations of history sitting just beneath the surface. I had grown up on a 120-acre farm in the middle of nowhere, but this felt different. That farm was conventional — seasons meant tilling, drilling, spraying, harvesting, and repeating.

This was something else entirely.

Our acreage was small in the grand scheme of agriculture, but to us it felt like stepping into something we were never quite supposed to have. Like we had been handed the beginning of a life we didn’t yet know how to live.

What we found, though, was not a pristine homestead. It was land that had been left alone for nearly thirty years. Fence rows overgrown, poison ivy thick as tree trunks. So we got to work. Clearing, cutting and rebuilding. We brought in goats, a handful of chickens. Then a lot more chickens, then cows, pigs and finally dairy cows.

Little by little, the dream took shape.

But alongside that growth, we started to see something else.

We listened to the stories of the farms around us.

The record-setting dairy farmer who couldn’t make it work with anyone but the milk truck — and nearly lost everything. The small operators juggling hundreds of customers but with no margin left for their own lives. The large farms absorbing the smaller ones, often from families who had no one left to carry the work forward. Farmers starting side businesses — excavation, trucking, anything — just to keep the main operation alive.

Again and again, we saw the same thing:

The system wasn’t working.

Not for the big, the small or the ones in between.

At the same time, I had a manufacturing company to run.

Employees to train. Systems to build. Products to develop. Fires to put out. Always more waiting, always more demand, always more complexity layered on top of itself.

And I remember thinking:

Surely this isn’t it.

This dream we’ve been chasing… is this really how it ends up?

What’s the point?!

For several years, I just went quiet.

Reading. Studying. Praying.

There was this gnawing sense in my gut that I was out of place. That even though things looked good on paper, I wasn’t actually doing anything different. I was still operating inside the same structure, just in a slightly altered form.

So I started studying.

The founders of the automobile empires, Henry Ford especially, the legacy of the tractor makers, the huge sprawling axe companies, Mann, Kelly and Collins.

How did these companies start?
Where did they succeed?
Where did they begin to lose something?

And underneath all of it was this question:

Why does it feel like this isn’t working the way it should?

In my last post, I wrote about what happened when I finally stepped away from my job as CEO of a small, successful company. How much of myself had been consumed just keeping everything running. How, when the noise dropped, something became obvious.

The system itself wasn’t built for the kind of life I was trying to live.

It was demanding, consuming, and it had very little room for the creativity, beauty, and humanity of the people inside it.

So the question became:

What do I do instead?

And the answer wasn’t to build the same thing again, just under my own name.

The answer was to stop trying to centralize everything.

Instead of pulling all the work into one place, what if I pushed it outward?

What if, instead of employing people into my system, I equipped them to build their own?

What if the work wasn’t gathered… but distributed?

Because everywhere I looked, there were people already capable.

Sawyers, leather workers, smiths, farmers, builders, and makers. People with real skill, real knowledge — but no clear path to turn that into a sustainable, meaningful life.

At the same time, I had learned something else on the farm.

That raising your own food changes how you experience a meal, butchering creates deep respect, working with your hands creates connection, and that the old saying is true:

Heating with wood really does warm you twice.

I began to realize that what I was longing for wasn’t just productivity.

It was participation.

Participation in my own life.
In my family.
In the seasons God created.
In the work set in front of me.

And in that quiet, something shifted.

The pace slowed.
The noise faded.
And I could finally see it.

Not perfectly. Not completely.

But clearly enough.

The future I was looking for wasn’t one big company done differently.

It was many small ones, working together.

Not one centralized system.

A network.

A community.

A thousand small shops.

Shops where people are building something of their own.
Shops where work and life are not at odds.
Shops where skill is passed down, not outsourced.
Shops where production is human again.

For me, for FarmSmith Company, the idea is simple:

Make the important tools that help people engage in meaningful work.

Start with the basics.
Do them well.
And build from there.

Not by employing en masse, but by giving people a way out. A way to step into something of their own. My vision for my town isn’t one big employer. It’s a thousand small shops. Tinkering. Designing. Building. Making the tools people need to begin again.

And maybe that’s how this changes.

Not all at once.

Not through one company.

But through many.

Through people who decide to step out of the system…
and start building something better, right where they are.