Bartering

2025 has been a banner year for Toad Hollow Farm. We raised an excellent group of spirited heritage-breed pigs, our pasture-raised chickens filled two big freezers, and the last of the year's lambs are being processed this week.

It was the best year yet for garlic, with 6,500 robust heads of Ukrainian Red grown in our no-till beds. With fewer raccoons, woodchucks, and squirrels stealing the sweet corn and eating the summer and winter squash, we had a terrific harvest, plenty to eat and share with our neighbors and for trading with farmers. We love the barter system! 

For us, it isn’t just bartering. It’s our relationship with other neighbors and farmers––directly. It’s how we exchange. Our product, so to speak, is a kind of capital, not just handing money to somebody, but honoring their capacity as a farmer or as an individual, and when that exchange is made by hand, and we trade something that we each value, it’s an honest way of ascribing meaning to our exchange. 

We all have an idea of the world we live in – the cost of taxes and general daily life – and we know that we can’t just pull up to a gas station and pay with a box of chickens. So bartering is not without awareness and thought, but it’s about how I value myself as well as someone else’s goods.

Inside our solar barn this summer and into fall, we had okra, beet greens, nasturtiums, basil, turmeric and even a few figs, with the nasturtiums lasting until just a week ago, and we're still picking arugula for our winter salads.

And now with snow on the ground and the holidays upon us, we're cooking, reading by the fire, and looking at seed catalogues!