Positioning for the cold months ahead

With the end of our fall show season and the last cria birth of 2014 — finally, after I seemingly jinxed it almost a month beforehand — we have recently put the farm back into its fall/winter footing. The most obvious sign of this was the taking down of all of our internal fencing we use to subdivide the pastures around the CCNF Arena throughout our grazing season, and falling back into a drylot around the barn itself. We do that for a couple of reasons. First of all, it’s a lot easier to spread our composted manure and bedding back onto the pasture without having to maneuver the tractor around something like 15 fence lines of hot tape. But perhaps most importantly, we do that because of the extreme grade of the hillsides on both sides of that barn. Having the animals in the flat drylot area when they want to spend some time in the sun, is a lot safer once snow and ice start to become a factor. No one likes broken bones and twisted joints after all!  Other signs of the end of the growing season, are the five tractor-trailer loads of hay and straw that were delivered over the past 6 weeks and are now stacked inside at either end of the Arena as well. Needless to say, that with all that bedding, feed, and over 95% of our female production herd housed up there – and with no crias having been weaned yet, something which will begin in January — the Arena is a seriously happening place at the moment!

Meanwhile down at the two lower barns, we are trying something a little different for the first time. With a relative but temporary glut of males of all ages here on the farm, the Main Barn (that would be it in the banner picture above, circa 1997) has temporarily become a frat house! Given our space requirements for all of our boys and the fact that yearling huacaya males can start to act like hormonal 16 year-olds (sorry Sammy), we decided that it would be easier for the next 4 to 6 months if the MB simply housed all of our yearling and adult males together, as opposed to it housing younger males on one side and younger females on the other as we have normally done (with the adult Herdsires all living at the Stud Barn). Granted, the boys are in 4 separate feed groups but all in all it seems to be working well minus the odd daily spat, which is completely normal anyways. But what of our show females that just came off the road a few weeks ago, as well as the visiting females, here to be bred, which were all previously housed at the Main Barn? We have temporarily moved them down into the larger half of the newly vacated Stud Barn (which no doubt could use a lady’s touch anyhow…if only the reverse were true). We expect all of our visitors (there are only 3 of them at this point anyway) to all be heading back to their respective homes in the not too distant future. As for our female show animals, they will be free to head back up to the Arena and join the rest of our female herd, once they get through a 21 day quarantine period which started from their arrival back home from the Empire show (dumb trivia of the day: what do BVDV and Ebola have in common?). After that the (now temporarily ill-named) Stud Barn will most likely sit empty until early January when the first round of 6 month old weaners, male and female, from the 2014 birth class comes down to live there and adjust to life without their moms.

So the so called “off-season” begins, though any idea that that will bring a significantly lighter workload is rather fleeting, I’m afraid. In the case of yours truly, it means that along with hopefully paying more attention to this little blog of mine which has been relatively neglected of late, I also switch from managing the farm’s Herdsires and their breeding schedules, to catching up on CCNF’s various marketing avenues. We’ve rather quietly had a nice little sales run over the past couple of years now and the natural byproduct of that is that our listings of actual alpacas for sale is looking pathetically depleted at the moment. One major reason why the Main Barn is housing our males right now is that the 2012 birth class, who are now all mature 2 year olds, was very good to us from a strategic point of view, producing multiple world-class and Champion Herdsires. Some of those males we have already integrated into our breeding program here (kindly take a bow Mr. Centurion and Mr. Defiance), while others have headed off to new homes. There is another core group though, including the brown 2014 Futurity Champion, CCNF Magistrate, whom will soon both be making an appearance in our sales listings for the first time, while also being offered simultaneously for outside stud service. With the end of our birthing season and our medium-term strategic view now clear for the year ahead, there are of course some new alpaca females which will likewise be getting listed — or in a couple of cases re-listed now that they have given birth to their respective crias — for the first time.

As for my better half, both in life and here on the farm? Well on top of her never ending daily duties of overseeing and caring for our herd, the big picture has Jennifer becoming a fleece-sorting fool in the months ahead, whether sorting fiber to send to our mill, the Vermont Fiber Mill & Studio (which we co own with our good friends at Maple View Farm), or seeking out those excellent high-end white fleeces which can hopefully become part of the new Premium Bale Project being run by the Alpaca Coalition of America (full disclosure: I’m on the ACoA BoD)! It’s a different kind of work that takes up much of the farm this time of year but just like the change of the seasons themselves, we all welcome the shift in gears and look forward to the months ahead. As they would say in the Waldorf educational corriculum that both of our kids have grown up in, it’s all part of the natural rhythm of the farm…and we love it.

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