Ways Big Ag Quietly Crushes Small Farms
Quick Recap for Busy Chicken Peeps
The Rules Ain’t Built for Us
My dad worked for the USDA. He was a veterinarian for the slaughter industry. Someone who was responsible for healthy animals reaching our dinner plate.
That meant, as a kid, I got to see a side of agriculture most folks never do.
The government side. The side where paperwork outweighs common sense.
I watched him wrestle with it. He knew the rules, but he also knew the farmers. He’d drive out to visit a small producer and have to shut them down over something dumb…Meanwhile, the Big Guys could call someone in DC and have a whole facility exempted with a wink and a few words.
He hated it. So did I.
This Ain’t Just Policy. It’s Personal.
Fast forward to when I started Blooming Health Farms. I wanted to do it the right way. To offer real food from real flocks.
And what happens?
I start sprouting alfalfa and clover—nutrient-dense, zero-waste, live feed. Health department shows up, asks if my setup is food-safe. I remember saying, "not like a commercial kitchen." Wll long story short, they shut me down. They told me I needed a permit that they never even issued.
We tried to appeal, explain, and make our case. I had protocols, safety procedures, the works. Still got the door slammed.
That was the first slap.
The second? Eggs.
Colorado law says if you’re going to sell eggs, they have to be washed.
Makes sense if they’ve got poop or bedding stuck to them.
But what about eggs that come out pristine? The law requires us to wash off the natural bloom, nature’s protective coating, and expose them to the very pathogens we’re trying to avoid?
Then, refrigerate them to slow the pathogens we just made more likely?
Tell me how that’s logic. It’s not.
It’s control.
And it makes no room for nuance or nature.
The System Isn’t Broken. It’s Working Exactly As Designed.
I’m telling you, none of this is accidental.
The rules, the enforcement, the endless permits and permits-for-permits... they’re not there to protect the consumer. They’re there to protect the monopoly.
Small farms like mine aren’t a threat because we’re bad at what we do. We’re a threat because we don’t need their inputs. When you start raising your birds humanely and selling directly to your community, you cut out the middlemen. Middlemen have run the industry for years.
So I Built a New Game Instead
I wrote Thinking Outside The Soil to make the case for hydroponic feed.
Not as some shiny trend but as a tool to rebuild the food system from the roots up. Yet I realized something while writing it...
Even if you give someone the right tools, it won’t matter if they’re still stuck playing by the old rules.
So I started sketching out a different model. One that lives completely outside the system that keeps grinding farmers down.
Here’s the play:
Local Feed Hubs — set up where the people already are. Suburbs, towns, neighborhoods. Not way out on a back road.
Live Feed Production On-Site — we grow the sprouts, the insects, everything. Then we dry it, bag it, and send it out.
Community-Supported Flocks — people pick up their feed like they’d pick up their CSA veggies. They connect. They learn. They build something together.
It’s small-scale by design.
We Don’t Need Permission to Feed Each Other
This is our way of opting out and not waiting for the USDA to figure it out. Not begging for a permit that never comes. Just doing the damn thing. On my terms.
And that feeling when a customer picks up a bucket of feed and says, “I know exactly where this came from”?
That’s the win. That’s how we all rise again.
