Went homeless. Done Guerrilla Grazing by choice ever since

you got water she's just bored oh are you gonna lamb she's just feeling like a restless right now so she's starting to mess with stuff um yeah so i've walked jc here uh uh by herself all the way up to washington it was surprisingly hard that was like the first journey that i ever did like outside the valley with my dairy sheep walking wise like we've hitched rides down to mount shasta and stuff like that but i'm waiting to take this wagon out as soon as it starts to cool down because it's actually easier for me to travel good boy when i was living out of the pack boxes i was living under an umbrella a number of different shelters that i made before that like little wearable teepees and and little miniature teepees walking to sheepies from that paddock over there with my teepee that we're worth trading for it's raining so i go for my poncho i invented this new type of poncho it's eight foot by eight foot so it's square therefore it only needs to be tied up to one tree i'm warm waiting for them to get full of my little freestanding wool tv that i can do this with was snowing out outside of our little freestanding sheepy keep us warm while we're waiting for your your parents to graze there they are this is freestanding clothing that acts as a tent that used to be defined as camping paraphernalia so i sleep across the back and they have the front front half this is a really great area that really would empower homeless people to be warm dry and safe wherever you know the public it's so awesome what i'm doing here you guys have heard of gorilla gardening right a gorilla gardening is utilizing vacant lots unused lots to garden and make use of it's vacant lot i've taken my sheep through here for more than five years now no farms have access to this good graze in february what i'm doing is i i'm calling gorilla grazing scale at one to ten this is a 10 for sure freaking awesome [Music] this year you guys land too is that all right we walk through thank you so i walk on the curb and let my sheep graze this side strip oh yeah so your half of this is all right with you [Music] yeah sure all right when we walk through all right you're awesome have a good day i grill a garden for 10 years good boy this is 10 times at least more efficient than gorilla gardening because i'm harvesting multiple times a day i'm converting what's already here in the milk i'm milking in the middle of the dollar general store before they open because we slept behind it last night so yeah now we got clean milk it's assured whereas like when you grill a garden they could sell the property they could mow it down they could a deer could eat it this is assured multiple times a day harvest every morning i shake the night before milk into butter this is the butter i got a big hard block of butter from just two days of milking lemon i always have milk all i need is a half gallon of milk a day and that's 2100 calories so for at least six and a half years i've gotten at least fifty percent of my diet from my sheet milk and you don't need refrigeration um i actually have kefir grains in my main bottle i have kefir grains and so i don't i don't need to refrigerate them but this is my cooler this is my evaporative cooler cheesecake and it keeps everything down to 55-60 degrees so this holds my sheep pregnancy tests that have to be kept down to like the 55 degrees it's actually a perfect cheesecake yeah because you have butter here that's not melting no like have you heard of an evaporative cooler i have for like a swamp cooler for a house it's the same principle as when we sweat and and and it evaporates off it pulls heat off of our body i just take um take this and this has an adjustment so that it makes it more of a spray just wetter yeah and so i just do this twice maybe three times a day if it's 100 degrees or more yeah i just do this so what's a material it's wool you know how they say that wool is very breathable but yet insulative it's three layers of wool i made each this this is two layers this two layers is two layers but then i have this third layer around the bottom so this is the perfect swamp cooler material this is my bed well then you can just imagine that my head goes all the way i'm actually laying like a foot a foot down further but yeah i can totally stretch out because this is six foot and i'm only five and a half foot so i can totally stretch out but i keep my my backpack um right here so that i can use it as like a a chair because my grain grinder is is mounted um and it's really comfortable um like this looks like you have a book here yeah this book isn't yeah i'm really disappointed this book you have a lot of felted pieces there too as well what are those uh so all the pieces that i have left over after making clothes this is actually seven years old i made this with her mom my second dairy sheep i ever had and i've worn this every single winter and this has lasted four years so your sleeping bag or something in there as well um my sleeping bag is uh is in the back and then my winter closer and behind that a lot of this is like this is my curtains from last winter a piece for my curtain so installation yeah it's really really nice it's breathable but um because it gets cold here how do you fare in the winter time i have a stove a mailbox stove that i put i'm able to have a fire now it's gonna start being winter this is a really cool little stove it's got a secondary combustion line of holes at the top right before the flames exit so any smoke is coming out gets burned a second time so it's really efficient there's like hardly any smoke at all coming off this i have three forms of cooking i have that the mailbox stove in the winter i have this year round and so this is really efficient this is called a solo stove there's like probably 12 things that i i hundreds of things that i've tested this is one of those things uh solo stove this is like 50 bucks and it it's it's gonna last it hasn't started rusting yet and at all since you are off of the grid and on the move so how do you when you need power for example for your telephone how do you charge it do you have any equipment this battery is absolutely awesome i've had i've been using this for over a year now and it hasn't formed any memory and this whole thing charges in two hours and it'll keep my stuff charged for like a week for a week so every week you have to charge the charger well i have a solar panel too this is an important thing this is my shower this is one of the things that i'm very very impressed with you got to keep in mind i'm an anti-consumer like i'm impressed with this consumer product like i advocate people get this thing especially if they're trying to do what i'm doing so this thing is um got a it's got a mister for staying cool and you can do anything all the way to like a a stream that has a lot of pressure but i have a wire right here that i just attach it and it becomes a shower like that and so i just sit here and i also i have a hole on the back side of both sides of my of my wagon open up and so i have a hole on the back side so i can take a shower when i'm standing up but i like to just do it in here by just doing and am able to get everything and it's all metal construction so i'm able to put it on my stove so and i colored it black so it's able to solar heat and the bottom of it is very efficiently made for heating it up by the stove as you can see it's domed so any heat that would round out around the edge just gets caught and it just heats up so fast like like i can literally heat that thing up to 105 degrees in like five minutes with a handful of sticks it's so so efficient that is nothing more than it was only 50 bucks to 40 bucks at a home depot it's actually a herbicide sprayer yeah yeah instead of says yeah it's so easy and check this out like you can just take it and this is i tell people this is my sink right here see halfway in between halfway in between is right right there i'd say i call that like a so the pressure is so great this is a sink too but yeah you can see this is uh this pressure i take showers at 30 i guess it is where the green starts i pump it up to green so you can see how many times that takes it doesn't take much at all yep that's my that's my shower pressure right there i don't need any power to do that no and and that thing is last to me i've used it every single day for over a year the only thing that i thought was going to go wrong with that is seals like rubber rubber seals is hasn't happened and i've completely deformed the top of it and crunched it down because i use it as a tire jack before i got really good tires i was having flat tires like constantly and so i use that i pick up my wagon to shove that underneath uh as a jack and it's squished this down i i put that thing through hell and using every single day and it still works just as good as it did the day i got it it's multi-purpose so it's a sink it's a shower you pump your walls with it and it was designed for another purpose yeah it was designed for spraying spraying weeds i spray my sheep down with it in the summertime with the mister and myself to keep them cool it's awesome this is my milk bottle for when i have enough milk to do this um she is due like literally any second i was thinking that'd be really cool if she was lamin while you're here but um yeah she is literally like she's she's she's bagging up oh she's rubbing her head did you see uh when she was rubbing her head over there that means she's starting to go into labor like she's starting to have have difficulties she's got and this is our poop cups so you do that why um to catch this uh uh well i was selling their their poop for a while just to show people that you can do that you're a subsistence dairy shepherd so we'll work for local herbs veggies eggs meat etc you have a barter system yeah i have a full scythe business that i wasn't able to work on there i call it uh eco landscaping and scythe service landscaping instead of landscaping cutting down poison hemlock most of the stuff that i'm doing i do just to show people that you can do it a site is the best tool for managing poison hemlock like i don't need to make money i don't really want to make money i want to stay as mentally free as possible to do new things getting paid to cite this 30 bucks it's a double service because it's not only an end for me to be able to serve my small farmer community i can hack all this sweet pea down in a minute or two and then take the hay rake and rake it up and throw it in the back of the wagon and then bring it to one of the places that i stay and that's better hay than anything that you can you can buy and i'm also starting to hand hand harvested hay is another so i'm trying to like i have like i don't even know at this point how many different things that i have that i have made money off and i can make money off of that other people could could it's very easy i mean for anyone to do this i'm by the way i'm a prepper but i'm not like a normal prepper is in like like i call it selfish prepping i'm a community prepper like i'm not so interested in trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic situation if everyone around me is suffering so i'm trying to like uh figure out bring up the community so that they can all thrive i designed this wagon with my genius friend mike madden if you took plans that we have you can have any welder put together this wagon for a thousand dollars you have to have double wheel bmx bicycle wheels you need 24 inch because the actual design we had to cut open the bench seating on the side because it was originally designed for a 20 inch wheel but we found that the 20 inch wheel was so low that when you try to bring it off road even on mowed grass if any of the grass touches the bottom i have expanded metal and the grass goes into the corners of these and actually creates a lot of resistance so 24 inch had the much better roll ability to go over bumpier ground in the wintertime i have cardboard down there for installation if i need to i this is where i go to the bathroom down there and you don't have to clean it ever like i would be sweeping this out constantly like see this is from me putting my feet up while i was reading waiting for you guys and i can just brush this off and when it just naturally falls down there that would mean me having to to sweep this out you know like constantly so it's really easy for cleaning have you seen the new forms of solar ovens called solar evacuated tubes they're very very impressive and and there's something that will last your entire life this is one of the brands called go sun and these are called solar evacuated tubes this is a rather new technology that i'm really trying to promote and get out to people like i'm really promoting it to the homeless because we're having a really hard time with homeless setting fires accidentally and intentionally the mentally disabled ones this is a solar oven that uses these rather unorthodox trays but they're very very efficient like super efficient so efficient that i baked bread in the winter time they could afford to be a little bit thicker than this this is on the thinnest side that it should be my banana bread is done that is so amazing how does it work then so where do you go okay so this is genius it's combining a thermos which has a vacuum seal in between two layers and so it's combining a thermos with a greenhouse it's genius so the only place that heat can get out is through this rubber this rubber cap in this hole you put the food inside like small pieces yeah flavor is escaping oh my goodness potatoes well parsley wild garlic bulbs and three different types of my sheep's very aged cheese i'm making some wild carrot flour sheep soil and lavender and topped off with sheep cheddar cheese while damaranth yeah this bread ball i rolled in the wild sweet pea flower the chicory flower chicken relief they make larger ones than this larger tubes but they're not nearly as efficient as this diameter these guys didn't invent this i actually am connected with the man who invented this his name is alex key give him credit here's his story so these tubes originally were invented 20 years ago to pump water through for hot water heating and he thought it should be able to be a more efficient solar oven oh my god i overcooked it holy cow that's all butter it's as fast every bit as fast if not faster than an oven i am not even joking eggplant and their tomato okay it's something that like really needs to get out to the world because it's freaking awesome you can also turn it sideways and you can cook soup in it and i'm actually as soon as i can get a two inch cork and a copper coil i'm gonna make a water distiller out of it and so this is one of the things that one of the consumer items that i promote being an anti-consumer is saying a lot again this i'm really in love with this for grinding my herbs i originally got this when i was living out of pack boxes because i didn't have the capacity to have a full-size grain grinder i can't grind up herbs fresh herbs with the big grain grinder because the wheels are so big that they'll just absorb most of it and so this is uh this cute little wheel and you can tighten it down and make it make it finer or it was set for just my pepper this is uh this is my kitchen drawer i guess this is my walk walk is another thing that you need because you need to be able to winnow seeds i got a bunch of seeds that i collected and i can't do that without a wok these are some wild some wild grain that it's not fully finished i gotta grind it i have my work gloves in it and i grind them and then put them in my walk and then on a windy day bounce them and then it blows out the shape i didn't even go all the way through these bushes but a bunch of salsa here my sheep's eating salsa and we got one right here all parts of it are edible raw it's got actually a pretty awesome tap root that's easy to pull up even in like hard soil but this is called hawksbeard it's a wild edible plant but it's just not nearly as palatable or nice of a texture i'm gonna fry it all up with my sheep's butter well sweet pea shoots mustard greens uh parsley and wild onions two different types of my sheep's cheese i'll fry it up in my sheep's boater i've been backing out all the wild edibles that i know of in the community that i'm in over the last couple years so i started with trees and then i started the ground plants i just put dots uh where there is spring water coming out i mapped out the nutritional content of each of these plants we got the 10 pounds of wild parsley i picked yesterday drying out all right willie's got a year's supply of wild parsley he's packing potatoes is the main thing that i that i get from what i call the artificial economic system this is wild mustard seed this is i make mustard this is mustard i'm testing this i just started making mustard the other day i used my sheep's uh my sheep soured whey with this ground up mustard seed and a little bit of salt and it's it settles as you can see it's like liquid and then the the paste but i mix it up with a spoon and i made this a month ago and it's got nothing but spicier it's not going bad because because it's probiotic it's like um as long as i let it breathe breathe every once in a while then and and stir it up then it's actually becoming more and more like a like a wasabi there's never any mold growing on or anything yet so i'm kind of testing to see how long this without refrigeration i'm not even keeping in the refrigerator but that's the power fermentation right i mean you're doing that with your cafe you're doing that with a mustard yeah fermentation is like is everything because we're more microbes than we are on human cells is what they're finding out now and so it's important to restock your body with healthy microbes this is wild parsley from outside ashland that i collected last summer it's one of the herbs a lot of herbs like will lose a lot of their flavor within like the first six months of having them especially unrefrigerated um out in this weather but this i am surprised it is the the longest lasting um herb rosemary doesn't even keep that long like i got rosemary and i gotta click that like every couple months yeah we got this is fennel fennel stays good too for a long time oh and i started after i make sheep cheese then you have your whey left that has a little bit of cream left in it and you boil it and then it that creates ricotta the ricotta will rise and then i scoop that off the ricotta off and then i put it into my solar oven and i roast it basically i dehydrate it and uh and this stays good for a really long time too it still hasn't gone bad and i made that one six months ago i don't want to eat it all because i want to continue to see how long it lasts here's some more mustard seed these are a spicier version so this one's like a tasty very full flavored one and this one has no taste other than spice so i mix them and this is low-fat ricotta roasted ricotta after i've taken the butter off of it out of it and then this is full fat ricotta and this is really good and again it doesn't go like i thought that this one would go bad first because it has the oil still left in it but it's still good so yeah ricotta um you can take your way and you can make you can save your way and you can also reduce it down to like a syrup so i have like a syrup that i squirt over salads and then i got like uh reduced balsamic vinegar so you can do a lot of things with uh with whey and with the milk like besides all the varying cheese that you can make the whey leftovers you can also make a spectrum of a dozen different products this is my big cheese press it's all in one i i advocate this this is 50 bucks maybe it's called a mad milly cheese press all in one cheese press it takes up no weight takes up no space this is my other cheese press slash kefir this is going to be like a white rounded brie i got wild parsley in it that's what the green is but this is such a fine screened sieve that i can pour kefir into it that's thickened and it will leach the way out and become kefir cream cheese so these are just coffee filters yeah and it takes you how long to make cheese when i pour kefir in here after it's already thickened it just keeps getting better and better so like yeah without refrigeration you pour kefir in there and after a week a week and a half it's gotten nothing but better and then past a week and a half it turns into breed basically let me show you both sides so um both sides open up for through uh through ventilation and the summer i wanted this to be like really comfortable because everyone that's making these small shelters they don't make them open up at all they they crawl in just the back and then they're trying to figure out some kind of ventilation it's like dude just make the sides open up and then you got full ventilation and so i have um i have this layer right here because in the winter time uh it rains more and so i want this side to be a little bit lower this opens up higher but i have a lower setting on this side i don't have a lower setting on that side it's usually windier in the winter time and so i leave that side down and i just use this entrance and exit and then this is for my sheep's side and i also have fabric that i sew it in and it's actually a room this is my way of being able to open this up but still retain my heat from my mailbox stove so and then when i want to take a shower inside i am able to take this and throw it over the back so it doesn't get my stuff wet like that and then um and then i hang my poncho from that carabiner so that it protects all that stuff that's how i keep everything dry while i take a shower and this is how i keep everything warm inside in the wintertime when i want to give my my sheep their room their their little little tent i guess it's like a tent but normally you're moving every few days or how does it work if it was up to them they would be moved constantly and if i don't move them like if i stayed on this property for 72 hours the milk production would drop because their interest would drop and the whole design of this is so that i can walk them around continually ideally and absolutely maximize their milk production for surth rival not just survival and this this roofing has lasted a year and a half opening at thousands and thousands of times it's the pack boxes that i made out of this i used them for a year and a half before i had to make a new pair and that was with like 50 pounds like hanging it's plastic cardboard they call it chloroplast or corrugated plastic you guys want to go gray somewhere else huh we're gonna go grab some oils two biggest problems right now is our small farmers being put out of business so that we don't have enough local food security problem number two is we have an exponentially growing homelessness problem and so what i'm seeing is that those two problems can actually work together to become their own solutions how much the ra the rams love to pull this they love the job because the homeless don't have apparently a purpose in life and they're being convinced to give up hope whereas if they knew that they are the perfect candidates for being farm hands the free farmhands let's go here's the thing all the the small struggling farmers need affordable labor help and the one thing that they can trade instead of having to to pay for that labor is living space and so living in a tent at the very least if you're homeless on a farm's land is a great deal not only for the homeless but also for the farmer oh this is another thing you have to have these types of steaks in order to do what i'm doing there's no other way you could do what i'm doing these leashes are also like extendable leashes are another part of that dozen things if we can figure out how to at first it just promote the idea that homeless can do that then it'll start that bowl rolling it's been a huge help for me because like i've been a homeless by choice so that i could have more mind space to receive these things for like 12 years now you have to have poop cups because otherwise the communities will hate you because you'll have poop all over their [Music] thank you for your sidewalks kids you guys are awesome [Applause] so do you do you get tired of this lifestyle i mean no i i it's going to be so it's going to be so much better once either the economy starts to become unstable enough perceivably to everyone else to get in the same mind frame that i am have been in for 10 years that got me involved with this once people start to do this it's already started to happen now the most basic thing that we've been conditioned with is is the socioeconomic ladder and so i'm obviously you know like perceivedly homeless sometimes the girls help full anything that's coming from above us is to be respected more thank you anything that's coming from below us is to be less respected [Applause] [Applause] you

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 588,842

Rating: 4.9234366 out of 5

Keywords: aaron fletcher, guerrilla grazing, guerrilla grazer, itinerant sheperd, homelessness, homeless, choice, self-awareness, dairy sheperd, subsistence sheperd, farmhand sitter, 123homefree, wandering sheperd, pastoralism, pastoral management, fire prevention, dairy, homemade cheese, evaporative cooler, craftsmanship, extreme off-grid, itinerant off-grid, public land grazing, solar cooker, solar cooking, traveling sheperd culture, wild foods

Id: U54HRmglYEA

Length: 26min 20sec (1580 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 15 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/DadaDoDat]

That was a much more interesting video than I was anticipating

[u/BenTVNerd21]

Definitely not for most people this lifestyle but in terms of impact on the planet he's doing it right.

[u/zen_tm]

Surprisingly fascinating watch.

[u/FamousNoise7501]

yes, you are welcome to come through, graze and hang out for a bit.

[u/Illllll]

No joke about the homeless issue here in southern oregon (where he's at). Hope he teaches some of the folks around here a thing or two!

[u/derpado514]

Thta solar oven thing was freakin awesome. This dude making gourmet meals in a tube on the streets!

I'm curious how clean the greens are where the sheeps are grazing? With all the exhaust and crap in the air around urban areas...can't be making good milk with that?

[u/Stahlregen]

I can just about smell this video.

[u/filmbuffering]

He knows his stuff.

The obvious worry is I guess he’s not putting much money away for emergencies, illness and aging.

That can seem optional - right up to the point you realize it’s urgent.

[u/JonBovi_msn]

It's impressive how that guy lives. I was wondering how he keeps dogs and coyotes from getting the sheep and how much veterinary care they need.