Tale of the 2011 breeding tape

What is an alpaca breeding pimp facilitator to do now that the off season has truly arrived? Read, drink beer, and whine about the weather? We will of course be doing all of that and more in the days and months to come but I also had an inkling this morning. Sorry. To paraphrase Crash Davis from that greatest of all baseball movies, Bull Durham, “don’t think: it only hurts the team.” For the last several years now, it has occurred to me that it would be fun to crunch the numbers on how many breedings we did here over the course of the prior season and what our resulting success rate was (the number of confirmed pregnancies). “Fun” being a relative term of course. I get it completely that this mostly an exercise in self-gratification and certainly not the sort of thing that is imparting any great wisdom. Whenever I’ve thought of this in the past though, it’s always come to me in February or March when all of that data has seemed like it would be less relevant. Not this year though. I’m sitting here at my desk with the hardcopy breeding charts from both the Arena and the Main Barn and now that I have the blog…well, I feel the need to share. Nothing says “Happy Holidays” like alpaca reproductive stats! Contain your glee. Let’s see what the numbers say though shall we?

The total number of actual breedings done here at CCNF in 2011 was 213 (including breedings to client owned animals). Out of those breedings 115 confirmed pregnancies resulted. So it took us an average of just under 2 breedings (1.85) to achieve each pregnancy. Anecdotally that success rate strikes me as feeling a little low as I would guess a success rate of somewhere between 1.5 to 1.7 breedings/pregnancy in years past. Granted a few challenging problem cases may be skewing the numbers a bit this year. For instance Opal and Sunrise alone account for 12 of those breedings with no resulting pregnancies thus far, grrr.

Breaking those numbers out into a couple of different categories, we find that of the females we bred that were already proven or had been previously pregnant in their lifetimes, it took 162 breeding to produce 80 confirmed pregnancies, or an average of just over 2 breedings/pregnancy. That number in particular is really the fly in my statistical soup it would seem. Conversely when breeding maiden females in 2011 our average was much closer to what we would expect: it took us 51 breedings to achieve 35 live pregnancies, an average of 1.45 breedings/pregnancy. That really meant that most of the maidens being bred here were getting pregnant on their first go. Good maidens, we like it when our alpacas make us look like we know what we are doing.