I THINK that if you had an upgrade slot (which the rancher also lacks - boo) you could use the cobblestone upgrade - although on further research that would only lower it to 7x7. Boo. Maybe a "dirt upgrade" to drop the radius by 2...
bingpong, currently the minus radius upgrades only decrease radius by 1.
perhaps instead of adding more minus radius upgrades you could actually have the one minus upgrade be stackable inside a machine, and thus decrease the range like that
I'm also desperately looking for a mod that adds very early game portable storage.
there's a few ways to create early game portable storage, but they're often very small and thus you need alot of them to have plenty of storage, which again would clutter your inventory too much.
so I was thinking of perhaps a storage container that has plenty of room, but it can only be used once. so you craft the storage container, with not a too expensive recipe, and after crafting it you open it and put your items inside, and after that the container is locked. the only way to get your items back out is by shift-right clicking on a storage container such as a chest, and after the portable container is completely empty it'll disappear from your inventory.
right now I started a new world and I had to leave around about 10 chests in the world filled with items I couldn't hold in my inventory anymore, which is so annoying.