Bringing our Herdsire listings up to date in more ways than one
It has been a while since I’ve really gone through and cleaned up the Herdsire section of our farm’s website. While we have of course written up the occasional and important new arrival over the past few years (CCNF Royal Magnus, TKO’s King of the Ladies, Snowmass Elite Legend, Snowmass Matrix Majesty), it has quite honestly been several years since we have really done an honest review and assessment of the males that make up our list of working Herdsires. The lack of significant updates and additions was partially a byproduct of several birth years that were quite female-centric (a novel idea after the testosterone driven birth class of 2011), where there just weren’t many — if any — males born here that we felt were of a high enough quality to join our Stud Barn. On top of that we’ve also not historically really placed all that much emphasis on offering our Herdsires for outside stud service and consequently those sections (plural if you count our listings on Alpaca Nation and Open Herd) of our online presence have admittedly suffered from benign neglect, at least when compared to our male and female sales listings. The other reason for not having gone through and weeded out those Herdsires that were no longer making the grade though was really just human nature: it’s tough to admit sometimes that an animal you’ve spent many years with — and in several cases a considerable amount of money on — is no longer as genetically relevant as he once was. Harsh but true.
Well, it’s reality check time. The economy and the alpaca market with it have also undeniably changed in the years since we first became co owners of the group of Herdsires known as the North American Alpaca Stud, the first major shift in our breeding program’s trajectory, a little over a decade ago. Though some of those boys (Messiah, Accoyocusani, Legacy Gold) are still with us today and being used in-house on a limited basis, others we admittedly culled from our breeding program soon after the NAAS became fully ours in 2007 or they simply have passed away. Things change and in the end you either adapt or you perish. Cliché yes but also undeniably true.
Though there are Herdsires on this farm which still justifiably command very high stud fees relative to the industry norms, we also recognize that the breeders willing to spend 5K+ on a stud fee in today’s alpaca industry are admittedly in the minority. For that reason you can now find (as of yesterday!) some of our younger boys appearing for the first time in the Herdsire listings of our site, the majority of them with more affordable stud fees than their more famous and highly proven sires. For the first time in 2012 we will also be opening up all of our unrestricted Herdsires for stud service to the general alpaca public. You will no longer need to have been an existing client that has purchased breeding stock from us in order to purchase stud services here at CCNF!
Mind you this does not mean that we are compromising on the quality of the Herdsires in our Stud Barn in any way: we have a track record of gelding and culling from the breeding ranks any male that doesn’t meet our standards, blue ribbons and/or Championship banners be damned. We are simply making an effort to offer a little more bang for the buck to all of our current and future customers, regardless of whether you choose to buy breeding stock from us or just do a drive-by breeding with one of our Herdsires. The official announcement concerning all of the above replete with links to the new boys and their descriptions can be found here on our web site.
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