Buttoned up just in time…
We’ve spent the last 5 days or so shifting the farm into it’s winter stance and I’d been meaning to (and probably still will) snap a photo or two to show you all what that entails. Of course I thought that with our pastures essentially used up for the season that we were just being proactive getting ready for the colder weather that was inevitably going to come our way over the next month or so. Little did I know that it would arrive so soon though, as we woke up this morning to 8 inches of the fluffy white stuff! Mother Nature apparently didn’t get the memo about that whole winter thing not starting until late December! There is some historical precedent for this of course as I still faintly recall many years ago trick-or-treating in 6 inches of snow (note: it could also have been only 2 or 3″, one of those childhood scale things) dressed as mummy no less. I also remember being pissed off that my parents made me wear sweaters underneath my gauze wrappings. Ramses and his ilk were svelte last I checked, not lumpy. Clearly I let that grudge go…
Winter mode here at CCNF means primarily two things compared to the way we run things the other 6 months of the year. The first big change is that all of the alpacas that were on outer pastures grazing since early May come back in to one of the three barns (Stud Barn, Main Barn, or Arena) after living for the last several months beneath the sun and stars. This can lead to a bit of a musical chairs feel as we rotate animals through to different buildings but in the end it puts the various members of the herd where they will all more or less stay until some time in January when weaning begins.
Secondly, winter mode means that virtually all outside grazing at the Arena comes to an end and we fall back to a dry lot area around the building for most of the 10 or so feed groups that live there. The grades of the hillside at that barn are steep enough that the benefits of lots of winter running room are outweighed by the risks associated with icy slopes and broken bones. Been there, done that: lots of money and not much fun. At the same time we create the dry lot area we also take down most of the internal fencing coming off that building that divides it’s immediately surrounding pasture into paddocks throughout the grazing season. That serves the dual purpose of taking down fences that will otherwise just make juicy targets for future snow and ice storms, as well as opening those pastures up so that we can more easily get in there to spread composted manure with our tractor.
Though the grass they are eating is of negligible nutritional value at this point, we have nonetheless kept two of the feed groups at the Arena out on their respective paddocks off the east end of the building where there was still some grazeable length left for them to eat down. Though in all likelihood even those paddocks will be closed down as well by the end of this month, as one of them has 25+ hungry adult females munching away. In the meantime, it feels as though we are settled in for the winter to come. This first storm — as is the immemorial tradition of the farm — did catch us unprepared with nary a snow tire on any of our cars or trucks to say nothing of any chains on the tractors and utility vehicles that are the mechanical backbone of the daily cleanup here. None of which would particularly matter if we lived on a flat place. Unfortunately with some 200′ in elevation change from the bottom of the farm to the manure/compost piles above the Arena, traction is rather important. The very thing that saved our skins during Irene now shifts and becomes a bit of a liability. In reality when it’s the type of sticky compacting snow we got last night though, it matters little if we received 2 inches or 36, as either will causes cars, trucks, tractors, and ultility vehicles to go sliding (sledding?) down the hill. I’ll bet that all of the tire stores around this area will be busy tomorrow. Welcome to the unofficial start of winter 2011/2012 everybody!
