Barter system

Love the barter system and hate money. I use it very regularly :thumbs:

 

It bothers me to see someone like yourself having to deal with hatred.

If you'll send me that which you hate, I promise it will never bother you again.

Dang, am I a nice guy, or what?? :thumbs::saint:

 

I tried to start a bartering thread but it didn't go anywhere. Glad to see this one.

Saggy, we grow/catch/raise/kill about 80% of our food. The other 20%, as well as cleaning supplies and hygene things, we barter for.

We barter for just about everything. It's very rare that we pay cash for anything, unless it's at a yard sale or something like that.

 

I bake home-ground whole wheat bread that I sell at a farmer's market. I trade it for farm fresh eggs with another lady. It benefits both of us. Same with another guy at the farmer's market. I give him bread that didn't sell that day and he gives me his veggies that didn't sell. Personally, I'd rather barter than simply buy something at the store. It's more fun.

 

Wow! Wish I could do that! Unfortunately we cannot raise livestock in town or I'd have a flock of chickens and several rabbits and goats or whatever else I could raise for meat.

 

I'm not sure which is better: the taste of grass and bug fed chickens, or the look on liberals' faces when I explain that it's my thirteen year old's job to kill them.

Seriously, though, you have no idea what you're missing.

The beef and chicken and pork you buy in a grocery store is pumped full of chemicals and hormones in order to make them grow as big as they can in the shortest amount of time they can.

Unfortunately, three side effects of this are that you sacrifice tenderness, taste and even nutrients and this is just what most people have eaten all their lives, so they don't know the difference and think we're just putting them on when we talk about grass fed and organic.

Same with vegetables. The vegetables you buy in your store are not only sprayed with God knows what, but aren't even fresh by the time they get to your grocery store. They're only meant to last two to three days in a grocery store.

By that time, not only have they lost a lot of their nutrients, and not only are they already slowly going bad, but they're losing their taste. As if that weren't bad enough, they're picked at the first opportunity and not allowed to mature. That means that their taste hasn't even fully developed yet.

Let's put it this way: there's a reason a stalk of store bought asparagus looks like a shoelace and a homegrown one looks like the bottom half of a pool cue.

Our Amish friend, Sarah, loves to give us asparagus. So much so that we usually end up passing it on, lest it goes bad because she gives us so much.

I gave some to a friend of our family and she was truly amazed. She honestly thought this must be some kind of world record asparagus until I explained to her that this is what real asparagus looks like.

It's not an easy thing to do. It's a lot of work, both gardening and raising animals, as well as having to deal with questions from people who think we're weird for doing so. But it is better on many levels. Obviously, it's healthier and saves us a ton of money, but it also tastes better, gives us a very satisfied feeling of achievement (which is also a terrific trait to pass on to the kids), and we get to spend more time with our children.

I think everybody should grow something they eat, even if they only have space for one little tomato plant.

 

Actually, I was 13 when I learned to butcher chickens on my grandparents' farm. Home-grown food just can't compare with the commercially grown junk we get in the grocery, that's for sure.

 

Same here. I was about twelve or thirteen when my dad and grandfather taught me how to butcher hogs.

I just think it's funny that I have a neice around thirty years old (born and raised in the city and no idea how things work out here) who is absolutely horrified that it's usually my son who kills them. Of course, she also freaked out when she found out that he lived in a tent for four months.

No, it really can't. That's why farmers' markets, the "locavore" movement, and CSAs are becoming so popular.

 

Just remember, when you barter, the govt still wants to be paid for it. Bartering is not tax exempt. :BangHead:

 

Technically, it isn't. However, what the law says leaves what you choose to declare very ambiguous.

Under the law, the only taxable part of a bartering transaction is the difference between the value of the two items bartered. The problem with that is that it's up to the two people bartering to declare their value.

For instance, I can barter my truck for a pair of shoelaces and as long as the other person and I agree that both the truck and the shoelaces are worth $1, then nothing is taxable.