About
I will worktrade for just garden food, eggs, meat or honey. Please feel free to stop and discuss possibly working together if you see me traveling about or you can get ahold of me at 541-778-7723. Im building a larger network of properties to worktrade for around the Rogue Valley that we can most sustainably travel around in the future.
I will do any manual labor no matter how difficult or gross; cleaning chicken coops, cleaning out barns or just digging holes for fence posts! I most enjoy worktrading in livestock management by shepherding, trimming hooves, shearing, holistically treating ailments, drenching, deworming, birthing assistance, milking, making cheese and butter! My dream jobs are to shepherd your herd off property, manage a sheepfold/goatfold for a dairy farm and manage a farmstand!
I also have some skill-shares to barter for your farm food and/or camping including my foraging wild edible plant walks, herbal latte creation, goat milking lessons, natural cheese making, my wool “box felting” method, primitive wool spinning method using just a stick, surthrival lessons and prepping consultations.
Ways you can help us if you aren’t interested in any of our services;* Let us rest in your yard overnight!
* Donate any garden/farm food!
* Help my monthly prepaid phone bill, website fees, making my new inventions, working on my new activist projects, etc. Paypal.me/HomelessShepherds
How this all started for me..
My name is Aaron and I’ve been a voluntarily “homeless” activist to better focus my mind on World solutions since 2006 and ive been homeless while living with miniature goats and dairy sheep since 2014. I was part of a small group that met to help rewrite Ashland, Oregon’s “Urban Livestocking Laws” which allowed citizens with regular-sized backyards to have 2 miniature dairy goats among many other animals. Once miniature dairy goats were made legal i began promoting it to everybody to get some food sustainability in-town. After 6 months of promotion nobody had even talked about making any moves to get themselves some little dairy goats so i printed flyers for an “Ashland Goat Share”
and handed them out until i got a couple of yards interested in trying it out for a one-month trial. Then i put together the money i had been saving from telling “jokes and inspirational quotes for a quarter” on the street and used it to buy the first 2 little dairy goats off Craigslist for $150 each. Well, long story short almost all the yards backed out before their one month commitment so that i was walking the goats around more and more in a 24-7 homeless fashion and eventually i gaveup hope with the goat-share program and i set up camp outside town with my animals. Then i was worktrading on a dairy-sheep farm and ultimately decided to switch to dairy sheep because;
-dairy sheep grow faster than meat goats do!
-their milk is almost twice as nutritious with 4x the B12
-their milk is almost twice as sweet as goat!
-their lanolin is converted by UV light into vitamin D3 and added to store milk!
-their lanolin is a natural moisturizing, antimicrobial oil!
-they are much easier keepers on fencing than goats!
-they are quieter!
-they mow the lawn better than goats.
-they have another byproduct called wool.
-they have another byproduct called lanolin.
So I went to work on the sheep farm for a couple of months when all of a sudden a friend informed me that the Ashland City Councelors had passed a new law targeting me by making it illegal to “walk livestock through town”!?
City councel clip proof here https://youtu.be/NaGplTiTSYY
I promote dairy pets as the most efficient and sustainable way to supply people with their own food, clothing and cosmetic needs(lanolin). Sheep milk/cheese is so nutritionally complete that a half gallon of sheep milk provides more than 100% of your daily calorie needs!
“You can toil soil and wait longer to reap, or you can turn what’s already there into milk with a sheep!”
“You can buy a dog and a mower and have to feed them both their fuel, or you can just get a goat that mows and it’s milk will feed you!” -me
You can simply get a couple dairy sheep or goats to help you and your community’s local food security most efficiently! If you don’t have space to keep your own, you can still get a couple to put in a friend or neighbor’s yard and then you both can share the wool, meat, milk, butter, cheese and milking shifts like i did for a minute with complete strangers through my goat-share program. You could even make money off loaning your sheep/goats out to neighbors as lawn mowers and blackberry bush eaters! Craigslist is the best place to find yourselves some little producer pet goats around you.
Here’s a link to a dairy sheep farm database for you to find a dairy sheep breeder near you because they dont usually advertise on CL and tend to be a little more expensive.
Being a “homefree” person is the opposite of being homeless..while it’s also the opposite of being housed, 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”.
