Home-free American herder-gatherer guy

Aaron Fletcher, Kirsten Dirksen, 10/22; Pat Macpherson, Ash Wells (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

The life of a modern American "herder-gatherer" is not easy but it is fun and creative.

Home-free American shepherd shares shepherd-gatherer diet and survival tips with Kirsten Dirksen

(Kristen Dirksen) Oct. 16, 2022. For more than a decade, Aaron Fletcher (123homefree.org) has lived as a nomadic shepherd in the U.S., mostly out of a micro-camper pulled by sheep.

A sadhu (spiritual wandering ascetic) in India

He supports himself as an itinerant farmhand through work-trading and bartering sheep’s milk for food and supplies.

He also skill-shares in exchange for food, “including wool felting, wool spinning, cheesemaking, survival, bushcraft, etc.”

He considers himself a herder-gatherer, and his diet consists of a lot of milk and cheese (courtesy of his friendly sheep), as well as foraged foods (wild greens, seeds, and even ingredients to make his own toothpaste) and some traded flesh, potatoes, and citrus (especially after learning he was deficient in Vitamin C and dying of excess protein consumption).

I should meditate or smoke ganga or DMT or sumtin

He’s lived in apartments and conventional homes, and he was about to purchase a home before deciding to go nomadic a dozen years ago. He now lives all year, even during the snowy Oregon winter, in his tiny sheep cart that is fitted out with a bed, folding table, solar freezer, wood-burning stove, dehydrator, and solar cooker.

He defines himself as “homefree” or “the opposite of being homeless...it’s also the opposite of being housed [a householder bound to property, taxes, and expenses], it’s like the third side of a coin. There have always been the haves and the have-nots (possessions), but homefree means being a have-not-want.”

He sees his sheep-pulled covered wagon as the ideal-sized home: more equipped than living off pack boxes and less cluttered than a traditional house.

• Aaron Fletcher's YouTube channel:
• youtube.com/user/123Homefree
• Blog: 123homefree.org/about
• On *faircompanies: faircompanies.com...

Comments (1,754)

(Brian Mahoney, Oct. 2022) The value of this video is that without it I wouldn’t ever even imagine that someone was doing this. I feel like I’ve been really caught up and maybe feeling a little trapped in the system. It’s so refreshing to see this guy demonstrating that life isn’t limited to the lanes that are painted by other people.

• How to make a "hobo stove" for free (Waypoint Survival)