Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:
It has a slightly broader meaning in the context of the minor story arc of Wyatt and Billy looking around the commune and making friends among the people they meet. The commune has a lot of members. Around 15-20 adults and almost as many children. Lots of people to shelter from the weather, and lots of mouths to feed. There's a discussion of a nearby commune where the members were inexperienced at living off the land, and they suffered much during their first winter season. That commune had its population drastically shrink, but the dialogue doesn't say whether the cause was from deaths or from people leaving. Then there's a scene where several men are walking over a plot of ground reaching...
Full answer by Sotto Voce: https://movies.stackexchange.com/a/132367 (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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