User:LivingFlowApothecary

I'm James Ken, of the Ken family — James and Braylynn Ken and our seven kids. We're from Saint Paul, Minnesota, and we're hand-building our family farm on 5.2 acres of raw high-desert land in Costilla County, Colorado (San Luis Valley), at about 7,700 feet elevation — fan gravel and volcanic cinder over loamy sand. That's our project: LFA-42-SLV-2026 (Lot 370, San Luis Estates South).

Everything is built by hand — no wood, no nails, no conventional construction. The family is both crew and classroom: we learn by doing, together.

Our build sequence is simple, one step at a time:

1. Fence the sheep acre.
2. Build the sheep barn.
3. Bring in the sheep water.

Our registered Navajo-Churro flock — 4 ewes and 1 ram from Arriola Sunshine Farm near Cortez, Colorado — were born in June 2027 and come home in fall 2027. The ground gets fenced and watered before the sheep ever set hoof on it.

Water is tended as one loop: three 1,000-gallon cisterns buried three feet deep, plus smaller buried caches. While the system is built out, water is hauled in. Layered on as redundant sources: runoff swales, snowmelt, and air harvesting.

Everything we learn gets written down in my books — The Living Flow and the build book — and shared freely: "Build it. Teach it. Share it."

This isn't a business and it's not a nonprofit — it's a family homestead, documented so other families can learn from it.

• My published project: LFA-42-SLV-2026: A family-built off-grid homestead system in the San Luis Valley