While this is a case study grounded in Josephine County, the dynamics described here apply to rural communities across the United States. What makes Southern Oregon distinct is not the presence of these pressures, but their intensity. Oregon consistently ranks near the bottom nationally for operational tax burden on small businesses, leaving less margin for error and fewer buffers when capital, labor, or infrastructure fail to align. In communities like ours, the effects are felt faster, deeper, and more visibly. That makes this region not an outlier, but an early signal. What’s happening here deserves amplification because it shows, in real terms, how structural design choices ripple through rural economies long before they become obvious elsewhere.

What was learned at the Rogue Valley Food Systems Summit, and why fixing this will take all of us.

A Room Full of Capability

The problem is not a lack of people who know what they are doing.

The Rogue Valley Food Systems Summit did not feel like a gathering of people who were failing. It felt like a gathering of people who were capable, informed, and ready to work. Farmers, educators, nonprofit leaders, buyers, funders, service providers, and organizers filled the room. No one was disengaged. No one was naive. Everyone understood their role and carried responsibility for a piece of the system.

Talent and motivation are present, structural links are missing.

It was not a lack of effort that stood out. It was a lack of connection.

This valley does not lack talent or motivation. What it lacks is a functional nervous system; one that connects people, resources, and information in real time.

The Rogue Valley Food Systems Network is working with Open Future Coalition to design that connective infrastructure. The system is still in development, but you can stay informed and follow its progress by connecting with https://rvfoodsystem.org/.

The summit revealed the real structure of the local food ecosystem. The soil is our land, water, infrastructure, and rules. The plants are the farmers, tradespeople, educators, producers, and service providers. The roots are families and neighborhoods. The nutrients are money, labor, time, and attention. What is missing is the connective mechanism that allows information, resources, and value to move laterally between local actors instead of vertically into distant systems.

According to ecological systems research, mycelium forms underground networks that distribute nutrients and information across ecosystems and are among the most resilient biological structures on the planet. Mycelium functions like an underground internet, where threads called hyphae connect roots, share resources, and send warning signals about threats, allowing the whole system to adapt without a central brain.

Their strength comes from connection, redundancy, and regeneration, not scale or speed¹. That framing matters because the problem we are facing is structural, not cultural. Throughout this piece, mycelium serves as the model for rebuilding our food systems: decentralized, adaptive networks that convert disconnection into resilience.

Central Nervous Systems vs. Mycelium

Why centralized control fails in living systems, and distributed networks endure.

Our dominant economic and food systems behave like a centralized nervous system. They are optimized for speed, efficiency, and control. Signals move quickly upward to centralized decision points and products move back down to consumers.

Why centralized systems fail and distributed networks endure

This model works until it does not.

A highly centralized system functions like a body without a brain. Information and resources move through narrow, brittle channels rather than adaptive networks. When those channels fail, the system cannot reroute. During COVID, disruptions in global supply chains rapidly translated into local shortages of food, labor, and capital.

Mycelial systems behave differently. They are distributed, slower, and adaptive. When one pathway fails, others reroute. Damage does not cause collapse. It triggers redistribution.

Centralization optimizes control, not resilience

For those new to mycelium: these fungal networks span vast underground areas, linking trees and plants in a symbiotic web. The parallel is direct. A food system can connect farmers, buyers, and hubs to share nutrients like money, information, and capacity without relying on fragile, top-down chains.

According to research on decentralized and regenerative food systems, distributed networks are more resilient to disruption because their nodal structure allows resources and information to reroute rather than stop entirely². This is not ideology. It is network design. A local economy designed like a forest floor absorbs shocks. A local economy designed like a machine seizes when a single part breaks.

“Local Is Too Expensive”

How price signals get distorted when time, health, and waste are excluded.

Iconoclasm is the act of deliberately challenging a belief that feels settled, not to provoke, but because evidence shows the belief no longer reflects reality. In food economics, the icon that needs breaking is the idea that local food is inherently expensive.

That perception persists because most households are forced into a reactive shopping pattern.

Weekly, convenience-driven purchasing prioritizes immediate price signals over total cost. The checkout total feels economical in the moment, yet costs accumulate elsewhere through food waste, lower nutritional density, health impacts, and time inefficiency. Planning shifts the equation.

Hidden costs and time scarcity distort price signals

Research shows that shoppers with higher impulsivity spend more early in shopping cycles and are more likely to purchase lower-nutrient foods, reinforcing long-term cost escalation³. This is not a moral failure. It is a rational response to time scarcity, cognitive overload, and a system designed for speed rather than efficiency.

When food is evaluated across a full consumption cycle, including storage life, spoilage, reuse, and nutritional yield, the price comparison changes. This echoes the mycelium model. Just as fungal networks redistribute nutrients efficiently to minimize waste, a connected local food system can recirculate value – time, health, and dollars – more effectively, making local not just affordable, but regenerative.

Analysis from the Fair Food Network shows that many locally grown foods are comparable to, or less expensive than, conventional grocery options when assessed this way⁴. The issue is not price alone. It is the structure through which purchasing decisions are forced. Intentional, monthly, and bulk-aware shopping reduces volatility and stabilizes household food economics. This is not about spending less through deprivation. It is about aligning behavior with how costs actually accrue, rather than how they are presented at the register.

The Booth Ceiling

Why markets cap growth instead of enabling continuity.

Farmers markets are popular, visible, and well-attended. Yet many farmers remain financially constrained.

The limiting factor is physical infrastructure.

Booths and tents are not scalable systems. They impose hard ceilings on throughput, labor, and participation. Markets face waitlists, moratoriums, and spatial constraints. Grants Pass Saturday Market has experienced a multi-year moratorium largely due to physical limitations. New producers cannot enter. Existing vendors often rely heavily on unpaid labor and volunteer time to sustain participation.

According to agricultural market research, seasonality and labor demands are major barriers to scaling, and intermediated market channels remain underutilized despite being necessary for growth⁵. Tents create bottlenecks. Shelves create capacity.

What Is a Hub?

Coordination is infrastructure, not a building.

A hub is logistics infrastructure for local food. It is not a program, not a market, and not a branding exercise. It is the connective tissue that allows many small producers to function as a coherent regional system. In mycelium terms, hubs act as key nodes in the underground network, aggregating and redistributing resources – produce, storage, and demand – across the ecosystem, fostering resilience through shared connections rather than isolated efforts.

In practical terms, a hub is the interstate system for carrots, beef, jars, labels, cold storage, and purchasing power. It aggregates supply, batches demand, provides storage, and coordinates distribution. It replaces dozens of fragile, one-off relationships with stable, repeatable pathways that lower transaction costs for everyone involved – farmers, buyers, institutions, and households.

Without coordination, capacity remains invisible

What is notable in the Rogue Valley is that nearly every community is independently attempting to build some version of this, often without naming it as such. Farms form informal cooperatives. Nonprofits create volunteer-run aggregation days. Schools struggle to source locally at scale. Small processors search for shared cold storage or packaging access. Each effort is rational. Each effort is also partial.

The result is fragmentation: parallel solutions, volunteer dependency, burnout risk, and limited throughput. This regional video documents that reality clearly – widespread recognition of disconnected producers, fragile coordination, and the absence of shared logistics – even without explicitly using the term food hub. The diagnosis is already shared. Only the language differs.

Hubs are operational backbones. They convert goodwill into throughput, values into logistics, and intention into reliability. Until that backbone exists, communities will continue to rebuild pieces of it in isolation – well-intentioned, hardworking, and perpetually constrained by the same structural limit.

The Money Path

Where a dollar travels matters more than how much it costs.

At large national grocery chains, approximately $0.10 to $0.15 of every dollar remains in the local economy. Most of the remainder exits quickly through national supply contracts, centralized distribution, corporate overhead, and out of region profit capture. The portion that stays local circulates briefly, primarily through wages, before leaving the region, producing limited secondary impact.

Discount grocers matter for household survival. Stores like WinCo reduce costs through lean operations, employee ownership, and fewer intermediaries, allowing families to stretch limited budgets while keeping slightly more value local than most national chains.

Locally rooted grocers retain more. A higher share of each dollar stays in circulation through local wages, regional suppliers, and reinvestment, allowing money to move through more hands before it exits the area.

Dollar flow determines local resilience or leakage

Direct channels retain the most. Farmers markets and direct farm sales route dollars straight from households to producers, then back into local labor, equipment, rent, and services. The same dollar does more work before leaving.

That compounds over time. Food system economic research shows that produce growers supplying local markets generate significantly more full-time jobs per one million dollars in revenue than growers supplying conventional wholesale channels.⁷ Leakage is not ideological. It is mechanical.

Resilience depends on how often dollars are routed through systems designed to let them stay, circulate, and compound locally. That mirrors mycelium’s nutrient pathways. In a healthy ecosystem, resources cycle laterally through interconnected threads, building soil vitality over time, unlike a machine model where value leaks out centrally. By prioritizing local channels, we create a mycelial economy that regenerates rather than depletes.

A deeper breakdown of how dollars exit Josephine County is outlined here.

When Production Meets Infrastructure

Farms do not fail at growing food. They fail at being connected.

The transition from informal production to regulated food manufacturing exposes structural gaps that are largely invisible until a producer attempts to scale. Many local food projects begin the same way. Recipes are refined over years. Products circulate through family, friends, and community events. Demand grows gradually. The next step is not marketing. It is compliance.

In Oregon, moving beyond informal sharing requires approved processes, documented workflows, validated food safety controls, and access to compliant commercial kitchens. These requirements exist for good reason. They protect public health and create trust in the food system. The challenge is that the pathway to compliance is fragmented, expensive, and poorly documented for first time producers.

The compliance gap between informal production and scale

Information is scattered across agencies, informal guidance, and outdated references. Commercial kitchen access has historically relied on personal networks and word of mouth. Scheduling is inconsistent. Storage is limited. Copacking capacity in the Rogue Valley has been scarce and difficult to assess without insider knowledge. None of these barriers are obvious at the recipe stage. All of them become decisive at the scaling stage.

These are not individual shortcomings. They are infrastructure gaps. Like a damaged mycelium network that reroutes around obstacles to keep an ecosystem functioning, a food system needs connected pathways – shared kitchens, clear compliance guides, and coordinated access points – to help producers scale without friction, turning barriers into opportunities for regeneration.

When compliance knowledge, kitchen access, storage, and processing capacity are disconnected, producers face repeated friction that slows or halts progress regardless of product quality or demand. Here is a video that documents that transition in real time. It reflects a common experience shared by many small producers navigating the same terrain.

Permanence becomes Resilience

Stability is what allows systems to adapt.

Tents are temporary. Buildings persist. Access limited to one day per week is insufficient for families, elders, workers with inflexible schedules, and households without reliable internet access. Farmers markets create visibility, but that visibility is episodic. Locations rotate. Days vary. Information fragments. A unified, always available system is still forming. Until then, growers can be found here: https://rvfoodsystem.org/about/farmersmarkets

Fixed infrastructure supports continuity and trust

This is where third spaces become a critical vector.

Third spaces are neither home nor work. They are stable, shared, publicly accessible places where economic exchange, social trust, and information flow coexist. In food systems, third spaces include permanent markets, community food hubs, neighborhood grocers, and hybrid spaces that combine access, storage, education, and coordination. They are not events. They are infrastructure.

Research on food resilience consistently shows that fixed, locally embedded operations are better able to maintain supply continuity during disruptions ⁸. That is the essence of mycelium: Permanent, woven threads that endure shocks by redistributing flow, much like third spaces could anchor our food system against closures and create lasting resilience. Permanence allows inventory buffering, predictable access, institutional purchasing, and relationship durability. These characteristics cannot be replicated by pop up models alone, no matter how well intentioned.

The impending closure of Ray’s Food Place in February 2026⁹ illustrates the consequence of losing a third space. That closure removes not just a store, but wages, daily access, local sourcing pathways, and economic recirculation. It creates a vacuum.

If prevailing economic signals continue to reward scale and centralization, national chains are structurally positioned to fill that vacuum. They have capital, logistics, and site acquisition capacity. The question is not whether replacement is feasible. The question is what is lost when permanence shifts from locally embedded systems to externally governed ones.

Resilience is not created by frequency alone. It is created by continuity, proximity, and shared space.

Microbial Homecoming

Place matters biologically.

Soil microbial diversity influences nutrient density in plants. Gut microbiota diversity influences immune resilience in humans. These systems are linked. Produce harvested closer to maturity and consumed closer to harvest retains more bioavailable nutrients. Early harvesting, long storage, and extended transport reduce nutrient density over time through oxidation, respiration loss, and microbial degradation.

Biological systems mirror economic and health outcomes

Microbiome research shows that bioactive compounds in whole foods interact directly with gut microbiota, supporting metabolic stability and immune function¹⁰. Additional studies demonstrate a measurable relationship between soil microbial diversity and human gut resilience, indicating that biological health is shaped upstream, not only at the point of consumption¹¹. The connection has become more visible in the post-COVID landscape, where chronic and unexplained health conditions have increased attention on food quality, not just food quantity.

Public health discussions increasingly emphasize whole foods, minimal processing, and nutrient density as foundational inputs rather than optional lifestyle choices¹².

Biological systems follow the same rule as economic systems. Extraction without replenishment weakens the host. Alignment strengthens it.

What we grow, how we grow it, and where it circulates matters at every level of the system. Just as mycelium restores microbial balance in soil, reconnecting to local food fosters a ‘homecoming‘ for our gut microbiomes, educating us that health flows from these interconnected webs.

The Education Enzyme

People are not cheap. They are constrained.

Scarcity produces reactivity, and reactivity reinforces the systems that created the scarcity in the first place. That loop consumes time and attention, which are the very resources needed to exit it. Breaking the cycle does not require better intentions. It requires restored agency, time, and structure.

When full cost information is hidden, people default to price heuristics. A price heuristic is a mental shortcut where shelf price is treated as the total cost because it is the most visible signal, even when it excludes downstream effects like wage leakage, transportation, and lost local reinvestment. Ease, not accuracy, is what gives shelf price its power.

This creates the “local is too expensive” fallacy. A $1.29 chain-store onion appears cheaper than a $2.25 local one, but the lower price omits externalized costs that resurface later as lower wages, reduced local services, and public subsidy. Behavioral economics shows that when hidden costs are made visible, willingness to pay shifts by changing how value is evaluated, not by changing values themselves¹³.

The pushback observed this month was not directed at the substance of the research. It focused almost entirely on the act of sharing a blog at all. Very few negative responses engaged the data, reasoning, or conclusions. Most comments instead reinforced the core argument, describing time scarcity, budget pressure, and fragmented access, even when readers felt unable to act on that knowledge.

Understanding enables participation and change

Engagement data supports this pattern. When people chose to engage, they stayed engaged. Average read time and scroll depth indicate that long-form, independently published analysis is working. What has changed is tolerance for encountering structured thinking in social spaces designed for speed.

January’s engagement reflected curiosity more than hostility. Where skepticism appeared, it targeted intent, not content.

Closing: Who Becomes the Hero?

If no one is the villain, who becomes the hero?

In 2025, Dutch Bros moved its headquarters from Oregon to Arizona. That moment was widely framed as a company abandoning its roots. It is more accurate to understand it as a business succeeding within the incentives of the current system.

It is also worth remembering how the story began. Dutch Bros exists because the founding brothers chose not to continue managing the family dairy farm. At the time, agricultural regulations made it increasingly difficult to remain viable. Coffee was not just a new product. It was an adaptation to system pressure. The story goes back further than we often remember.

Every reader is a living node in this system. Households, workers, farmers, business owners, educators, buyers, funders, planners, public institutions, and the people who shape attention online all influence how value moves, stalls, or circulates. Habits, planning, and attention are what activate the network.

If you are a worker, notice where your skills are needed locally.
As a business owner, examine how your purchasing, hiring, and partnerships reinforce fragility or build durability.
As a consumer, pay attention to where food comes from and the pathways it travels before reaching your table.
For those who teach, design, organize, finance, govern, or plan, understand that these capacities function as infrastructure.

If you spend time online, your role matters. Sharing with context, leaving reviews, commenting, and word of mouth are not passive acts. They are signals that shape visibility, trust, and survival for local businesses. When you reshare, add meaning. Resharing without context dissipates. Context turns attention into circulation.

As this conversation continues, watch for #southernoregongrown. It is emerging as a shared signal to help identify locally rooted producers, projects, and pathways. Consider it a marker, not a brand. A way to see the network forming in real time. No single role carries the burden. Alignment across households, businesses, institutions, and digital spaces is what creates resilience.

We do not need a new economy. We need to feed the one already under our feet.

Support the Infrastructure That Makes Local Work

If this mycelium-inspired framework resonates, there is a practical way to participate.

This work is not about branding a movement. It is about funding the connective infrastructure that local food systems currently lack – shared hubs, coordination tools, compliance pathways, and knowledge networks that allow capable people and producers to operate as a system rather than in isolation.

Underwriting helps convert analysis into execution. It supports research, documentation, pilot projects, and the quiet, unglamorous work of building durable pathways that keep value circulating locally instead of leaking outward.

If you are an organization, funder, business, or individual interested in supporting this kind of systems-level work, reach out to discuss underwriting or partnership opportunities.

Contact: richm@roguemediasolutions.com

This is how a fragile machine becomes a resilient ecosystem.

References

1. Frontiers in Environmental Science. (2025). Mycelium-based networks and ecosystem resilience. Frontiers Media SA. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/environmental-science/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2025.1639832/full
2. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service. (2010). Local food systems: Concepts, impacts, and issues (ERR-97). https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details/?pubid=46395
3. Vaidyanathan, R., Aggarwal, A., & Drewnowski, A. (2021). Impulsivity, cyclical food purchasing, and unhealthy food consumption. Appetite, 161, 105133. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33602347/
4. Fair Food Network. (n.d.). Buying local makes economic sense. https://fairfoodnetwork.org/from-the-field/buying-local-makes-economic-sense/
5. ATTRA Sustainable Agriculture Program. (n.d.). Selling to local and regional markets. National Center for Appropriate Technology. https://attra.ncat.org/publication/selling-to-local-and-regional-markets/
6. Berti, G., & Mulligan, C. (2016). The capacity of food hubs to build equitable food access. Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, 6(4), 39-54. https://www.foodsystemsjournal.org/index.php/fsj/article/download/650/637/1347
7. Farmers Market Coalition. (n.d.). Farmers markets stimulate local economies. https://farmersmarketcoalition.org/education/stimulate-local-economies/
8. Living Architecture Monitor. (n.d.). Investing in food resilience. https://livingarchitecturemonitor.com/investing-in-food-resilience/
9. KOBI5 News. (2026, January). Ray’s Food Place in Phoenix is closing next month. https://kobi5.com/news/top-stories/rays-food-place-in-phoenix-is-closing-next-month-291672/
10. MDPI Foods. (2024). Local and systemic effects of bioactive food ingredients. Foods, 13(5), 739. https://www.mdpi.com/2304-8158/13/5/739
11. National Center for Biotechnology Information. (2024). The effects of food nutrients and bioactive compounds on gut microbiota. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11083588/
12. U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. (2025). Historic reset of federal nutrition policy. https://www.hhs.gov/press-room/historic-reset-federal-nutrition-policy.html
13. McLaughlin, L. (n.d.). Mental shortcuts drive consumer choice: Understanding price heuristics. LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mental-shortcuts-drive-consumer-choice-understanding-luke-mclaughlin-vkbjf/