WHAT IS IT WORTH?

       On the PBS show "The Antiques Road Show" citizens bring their collectibles and antiques to an appraiser in hopes that they are special enough and valuable enough to get them onto the show. This illustrates how different people value different objects. What antiques road show does not teach is the simple fact that something is worth - whatever you can get for it.

    For instance, tomatoes in August are worth less then they are on the first of May. Without getting into micro or macro economical theories of supply and demand,  the idea of something  being valuable due to scarcity or rarity is a fairly simple concept.
  
     The advice I can offer to readers of my blog is to look past the obvious uses and presentations to see what else things could be good for.Creative individuals are cabable of making a living off of what others throw away.


     How does this help my homestead? Lets start with the grocery store - they will often save all the bad fruits and vegetables and garnish for enterprising homesteader to collect to feed his animals. They will sell this vitamin rich foodstuffs to you for little or no money, the same goes for out of date desserts, breads, and cereals.  Now to thte feed store - major discounts can be found on feed bags that have been torn open in transport - the livestock doesnt know the difference. Now to the lumberyard - cull lumber is always returned and sold for pennies on the dollar to an enterprising farmer who asks. Even the curbs on trash day or illegal roadside dumps can offer a chance for retrieving raw materials or items that still have a useful life in front of them for free. I just put two screen doors (curb rescues) up  in a shed as windows to allow sun in from the south to warm my sheltered livestock while still cutting the biting winter's winds. A barn does not need brand new triple insulated 9 year warrenteed windows much less a shed. So many building supplies can be liberated from old buildings being torn down. Tin  roofing can be reused many, many years. The mines of the future are the landfills of today. With technological advances and the popultion demading more consumables the refuse that lays buried all over the counrty will be a place to mine for burnable energy sources and sorted into tin, glass, and precious metals.
   Examine how much work it takes to get iron ore melted down and turned into iron. Now compare this to the amount of energy it would take to grind up and separate a dumpster ful of mixed garbage into recyclable raw materials.