Early Summer Roundup
Unloading the mental desk drawer of the CCNF blogger while wondering which alpaca female it is that I forgot to get bred this morning…’cause it’s that time of year.
- We got home on Monday evening from a fantastic 2 week family adventure to Norway. A June/July trip with our boys has become a regular and very welcome fixture in our family’s summer calendar ever since we stopped running an August production sale six years ago, and stepped away from the 3 to 4 month fire drill that those events necessitated. Our voyage this time around started by spending 6 amazing days on one of the ships that is part of the Hurtigruten line. Beginning in the city of Bergen in the southwest, we steamed up the coast and around the North Cape into the Arctic Circle and the land of the midnight sun, ending just miles from the Russian border in the city of Kirkenes. The Hurtigruten boats are all kind of a cross between a ferry, a cruise ship, and a coastal packet and make several ports of call along their routes. Many stops are as short as 15 minutes: just long enough to load and offload freight, cars, and passengers. As a would-be boat guy, waking up and having an early morning cup of coffee in our cabin while the Norwegian fjords quietly slipped on by, goes down as one of the undeniable highlights of my (almost) 45 years on this beautiful blue planet of ours. The rhythm on-board a working vessel is just a beautiful thing. In another life, I probably could have been a very happy merchant marine. That our dear friends Ole Erik and Laila Sjøli completely surprised us by joining up with the ship 3 days into the trip, just made it that much more fun! Experiencing both the group stages of the Euro 2016 Championships (Iceland!) as well as the Brexit vote while on board was also interesting to say the least. There was a decidedly sullen vibe among the German contingent on the ship the morning after the UK vote in particular. Not that we blamed them…
- After getting off of the boat and flying back south, we crashed for 5 nights with the Sjølis and there adorable kiddos at their farm, Alpacajoy of Norway, in the lovely town of Stavsjø, just an hour plus drive from Oslo. We got to catch up with some of the animals we had sold to our friends several years back — perhaps most importantly seeing some of the first crias as they now approach yearling age — and even got to watch CCNF Nazareth and his groovy new lucky pink halter breed a couple of times. We also spent the better part of a day touring nearby Lillehammer, site of the ’94 Winter Olympics. The relative modesty of that beautiful little city, made us realize just what an overblown financial nightmare (looking at you Rio/Zika 2016) some of the more recent Olympic games have morphed into. Though this was Jen’s and my second trip to that lovely country after last fall when we first popped over to help our buddies as their American/Canadian animals were going through Norwegian quarantine, for our boys this was a first and to say that Norway made an impression, would be a vast understatement. We are all officially smitten.
- While we were away playing in Viking-land, the crias continued to fly out here at the farm and the paddocks on the south side of the CCNF Arena have taken on a decidedly frolicky air. Our ever attentive herd manager, Kim Duprey, had her hands full delivering 13 babies while we were gone, the vast majority thankfully without any drama. Jen and I spent some quality time after we got home that first night playing “who’s your momma” at the Arena! Of course there is never a dull moment this time of year. With Kimmy off picking up her son, Aiden, as we were arriving home from the airport in Boston, we all had to change into work pants and chore boots (even Sam and Max), literally 15 minutes after we got back onto the farm, so that we could fix a mild uterine torsion on dear Jasmine. Hope you all enjoyed gallivanting around Norway for 2 weeks, now welcome home!
- Who turned off the spigot? After a May and June with plenty of regular and steady (as opposed to torrential) rainfall, we have dried up around here all of a sudden, which is to say that it’s like the vast majority of our grazing seasons. Feast or famine. There is rain in the forecast for this weekend though, something being celebrated by the elders in this household though perhaps not so much by our teenage pilot.
- As the opening line of this post alluded to, breeding season is in full swing. In fact, things have been at such a torrid pace since we got under way on the 15th of June, that yesterday I moved our record keeping for the year already onto a second work sheet at the Arena (that’s 47 separate breedings up there plus 2 more at Main Barn for the females we sold at the POC). The return home this past Tuesday morning (thanks Penny!) of the reigning crown prince, CCNF Elixir from our partner’s farm in Maryland, just means that much more craziness in the coming week, as he works twice a day to catch up with the backlog of 12 eligible and beautiful ladies that have been awaiting his arrival. When in doubt, I choose to live vicariously through our Herdsires. 😉
- We went to bed last night to the big news of the Alpaca Owners Association (AOA) election results. A brave new world indeed! Congrats to all of the winning BOD candidates and thank you for your willingness to serve our industry one and all. The big takeaways from where I sit are that the membership also voted to approve bylaws that give voting rights to all registry and association memberships (not just those paying an extra voting rights fee), allow electronic voting in the future (both a huge potential cost savings for the association as well as hopefully driving up participation considerably), and for the first time — insert drum roll here — we here in the US will be joining the grownups in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the UK, etc…in allowing crias conceived by either embryo transfer or artificial insemination to be registered. It feels like the first bricks might be getting laid that will allow us to mature into an actual livestock industry, and away from being a punchline in traditional agricultural circles. Forward we go.
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