Farm Barter

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The Barter Lady's progress showed other helpful aspects. For one, she was able to keep her swapping activities close to home; in great part on home premises, as when neighbors came with offers to help harvest the fruit crops on shares or to "work out" the price of a fat pig or a bred ewe or a baby beef. She effected about a third of her barters in nearby towns and villages, where she was able to swap with maximum control for goods and services required directly by her family, her farm, or herself.

Presently the Barter Lady began using the mails to advance her swapping. Reading is her favorite hobby, and the scarcity of cash had greatly reduced her supply of books and magazines. Evelyn began writing letters to the circulation managers of her favorite magazines, suggesting that she be permitted to pay for the subscriptions in apples. They were not ordinary apples; they were her very special, personally selected greenings, winesaps, and other honest-to-goodness eating apples, home-raised, home harvested, and especially stored to supply what most apples lack nowadays—flavor. She promptly discovered that most magazine circulation managers have a liking for good eating apples. Practically every letter brought a gracious answer and an enthusiastic acceptance of the swap offer.

So Mrs. Harris favored one of the well-known book clubs with a letter suggesting that she be permitted to pay for a year's selection of books with two bushels of Nancy Hall sweet potatoes and eight fat, home-dressed roasting chickens, the latter to be shipped air express at the expense of the recipient. The book club promptly answered, "Indeed," and scribbled the post script "delighted."

Thus through the years Evelyn Harris used well-planned barter to raise her family, keep up the productiveness of a fine farm, help neighbors, and make good friends. One of her most admirable accomplishments has been the use of farm barter to demonstrate the distinctive quality of home-raised foods. As any observant consumer knows, the real food value of harvests never can be gauged competently just by the gallon or pound or price tag. Food is life and the principal cost of living. Nutrition and flavor, which are frequently as one, are the real measures of food values. Yet the continual hurry-scurry marketing of farm crops takes appallingly little account of flavor or nutritive worth.

Tragically, too, the prevailing direction in crop genetics and grading is toward volume of yield; much more frequently than not, maturity and honest ripeness are either evaded or faked. The great bulk of our fruits, our favorite berries, tomatoes, or food vegetables are harvested far ahead of actual ripeness; oranges almost invariably are dyed; commercial pack tomatoes are picked completely green and permitted to turn pink in storage. Chemical preservatives and coloring afflict a high percentage of the meats and meat products we consume. Too frequently potatoes, carrots, beets, and green vegetables are taken off soils long since changed to pits of chemical fertilizers; they cannot possibly taste good or approach complete nutrition. As a rule, commercial apple crops are no longer bred, propagated, or sprayed to taste like apples. Too much of our fowl, eggs, dairy products, beef, and pork taste like what they preponderantly are, viz., the outputs of livestock factories rather than creatures born in sunlit fields, pastures, and feeding pens. We are the number-one farming nation of the earth and we spend more for food per capita than any other nation. And while paying for the most expensive food consumed in any comparably populated area of earth, we endure much of the worst-flavored and least nutritious harvests eaten by man.

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