A sustainable way forward.

Interesting things have been afoot here at CCNF over the past month or so. In between snow storms, hauls to Ontario to deliver Norway-bound animals into the next stage of their journey, and what felt like an all too-short family vacation just after Christmas, we have been quietly scheming. In a good way.

It’s no secret that for almost 3 years now, we have been actively culling our non-breeding alpacas for meat. In that time we have not only fed our own family and those of our staff members, but have also rather quietly (perhaps too quietly) been marketing our farm’s meat to individuals and restaurants across the country. If you are reading that for the first time and are in any way surprised by that revelation, it simply means that you haven’t been to our website where the button “alpaca meat” has been present for all to see for quite some time. You can read the essay that we originally wrote for that section of our web site here. When we first articulated those views and our rationale for proceeding with a terminal market as part of our business model, it was a different environment that we were in from the decade or so which had preceded it. The market for high-end alpaca breeding stock was at that time frankly just starting to rebound again, after hitting rock-bottom post-recession. Though we love everything about our farm and the life that it has given us since we began this enterprise in 1997, we were looking for a realistic and sustainable way forward in our business. How could we continue to breed aggressively and hope to achieve our farm’s long-term goals when the market for lower quality breeding stock, to say nothing of true non-breeding quality animals (both of which are the natural byproducts of ANY breeding program) was really hitting the skids?

Well, we thought, there just might be something to that business model that livestock breeders the world over have been using since time immemorial. And here’s the thing: not only does that business model — which at our scale has us culling between 30 to 40 animals each year — provide us with a guaranteed outlet for our non-breeders (a term which here encompasses all male and female alpacas which we don’t feel are of high enough quality to enter the domestic breeding herd) but alpaca meat is also delicious and incredibly healthy, being both low in cholesterol and fat, and high in protein. As a matter of fact, having made the psychological jump to doing all of that, we would now be very hard pressed to come up with a good reason why we hadn’t done it sooner. Yes, there is of course a percentage of the existing alpaca community here in the US who are deeply offended by the mere notion of alpacas as a food animal and I suspect that we have most likely lost those folks’ potential business for all time. That is of course their prerogative. We are running a farm and a business though, whose primary MO is the production and sale of alpaca seed stock. In 2015, we do not believe that there is a sustainable model for an operation such as ours without a terminal market. Quite frankly, this was Darwinian economics 101: adapt or die. All of which, on a much lighter note, leads us to a brief tale and ultimately the shenanigans of last week…

Last spring, Jennifer was attending a day long workshop on collecting and cooking with wild edibles, hosted by the wonderful folks at the Inn at Weathersfield, which we are lucky to have right here in our hometown. One of her fellow participants, Pam Knights, was a marketing/PR person who in addition to doing a lot of work with the Inn itself, has also been very active throughout the local food movement and had in fact been a co-founder of the Vermont Fresh Network, the state’s highly regarded farm-chef network, of which we (CCNF) have since become members ourselves. Jen and Pam got talking that day and it was decided not long afterward, that we would hire her to help us market our alpaca meat. It was Pam in fact, whom soon after looking over our web site last year, pointed out to me that while very well written, the meat essay was “too apologetic” for a piece that is actually trying to market something. Point taken. In fact, one of the reasons that I’m blogging about this for the first time here is that our original meat essay, which was in most respects addressed to our fellow members in the US alpaca community, will be coming down in the next month or so. In its place will be a fully functioning e-commerce site through which we will sell all of our various cuts of meat, our tanned alpaca pelts, and though it’s still a ways away, a proprietary cookbook of alpaca recipes! So a change is coming. The new e-commerce site will be far more informative than what we currently have, and though we will of course offer sales and shipping through our site to those customers that live further afield (with dry ice and FedEx, anything is possible), it will be squarely aimed at the thriving localvore food scene which has really exploded here in Vermont over the past decade.

The aforementioned cookbook has been taking up a fair bit of oxygen around here of late. Though we do count ourselves as extremely lucky to have the most willing of partners: Chef Jean-Luc Matecat, whom as luck would have it, also happens to be Pam Knights’ son. With Jean-Luc’s skill and infectious enthusiasm, we have been working to put together a cookbook which will ultimately encompass at least one recipe for each type of cut that we offer. The recipes are really coming from J-L, our lone contributions coming in the form of a few general ideas, some test cooking — which was of course great fun — and then helping to setup the layouts for the big photo shoot which took place last Friday.  That whole scene began promptly at 7:30 that morning with Jean-Luc starting to cook up 16 different recipes in our kitchen, all in fast procession, so that the amazing photographers we had hired, Bob Eddy and Tim Calabro of First Light Studios, could then work their magic. I got home from dropping Max off at school around 8:30 and found our living room and dining room table transformed into a photo studio with four different “sets.” Jen, Pam, Bob, and Tim had utilized pieces of furniture from nearly every part of our house, so that each dish could be shot at least 4 different ways, with the goal of creating true variety in the finished article. Of course perhaps one of the best parts of that day, was that once each dish was done being photographed, it was then ready to be tasted by the hungry hoarde! I must confess that the black bean chili didn’t last long once I got a hold of it. Though it was a very merry circus, it was also one that ran on for almost 12 full hours. It was close to 7PM by the time the dust fully cleared and everyone was on their way back to their respective homes. Phew.

Yesterday we got to see the first several finished pictures from the shoot — after what Bob and Tim call digital darkroom work — and to say that we are excited by what’s in the pipeline, would be the greatest of understatements. While the sale of our alpaca meat will never supplant the revenue that we make even from that of outside stud services say, it is undeniably one more important piece of the puzzle going forward. Stay tuned for so much more on this front…

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