Traveling Shepherd with Ingenious Shelter in Oregon

I can’t recommend Kirsten Dirksen’s videos highly enough. She’s a genius! Hundreds of wonderful videos of wonderful people doing amazing things. Trouble is, when I go to this website, I keep going from one video to another; they are all terrific. I can’t get anything done! youtube.com/channel/UCDsElQQt_gCZ9LgnW-7v-cQ

Re the above:

Aaron Fletcher has grazed his sheep and lived off the land as a traveling shepherd for 12 years. He calls it guerrilla grazing (a step above guerrilla gardening, he says) and he lets his sheep graze — with permission — public parks and side lots. Homeless by choice, he offers his services to small farms in exchange for food or a place to stay (though half his calories come from his sheeps’ milk).

With a tiny metal cart home pulled by his sheep he has a bed, a refrigerator/evaporative cooler, a shower (he uses a pesticide sprayer to pump up the water pressure), power (solar panel), sun oven, a mailbox stove for heat, bicycle tire wheels and a corrugated plastic roof.

Fletcher makes cheese and butter from his sheep milk and forages for seeds, fruits, vegetables and herbs. He’s created a map for foragers in his region. He makes some money with his scythe business — cutting noxious weeds for locals, but he insists he’s not interested in making money and just hopes to serve as an example for other homeless interested in guerrilla grazing.

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About Lloyd Kahn

Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include Shelter, Shelter II (1978), Home Work (2004), Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008), Tiny Homes (2012), and Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:

2 Responses to Traveling Shepherd with Ingenious Shelter in Oregon

  1. thanks, Lloyd! I get the part about not getting anything done, having just watched 3 videos in a row – but great stuff!!

  2. Great article about the shepherd in Oregon. I’m an expat Oregonian, now living in Hawaii for many years. I’m 89 yrs old, so not entertaining thoughts of emulating the Oregon shepherds lifestyle. However, something in my memories tells me that there was a time when I yearned for the simple, uncluttered life of the road … but didn’t make it happen…

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