Can trade labor for food almost every small farmer will accept this. Can be work on farm, or items they want, or skills they don’t have or are not good at. This includes things like child care and tutoring.
Go direct to smaller food manufacturers with buying club, you can get same discount as stores do when buying larger amounts.
You can ask certain farmers that are your friends if you can add animal to herd or flock paying for their food and such and a small fee for them to do work of feeding, much cheaper than store bought meat.
Plus most of the farmers I know can help you cut and wrap or process the meat.
Alot of farmers have wrecked stuff expecially older ones entering retirement, ask around and buy equipment you can fix and resell or trade with minimal work. We picked up 4 broken cow hay feeders cut into parts made 2 nice used ones and rest went into scrap. Paid 200 for the junk ones took 2 days of cutting and welding, some old paint and sold the two for 800 each. New ones that are not as strong sell for 1200 at local store the heavy ones are 2200 and you need to drive 6 hours round trip.
You can ask to glean fields after harvest, free food you just need to pick it and pay for your gas to get there
If you have a local smaller slaughter house you can ask for the offal, hearts kidneys lungs sometimes tails and tonguess. Cook into or grind into pet food, this can be sold as well.
We use the leaf lard from our pigs to make suet which sells well in farmers markets.
