The Fall Catchup (aka Where Have You Been?)

What’s that famous Twain quote/quip?

“Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated?” Something like that.

There’s been some stuff going on over the past several months, almost all of it good actually — from both a family and alpaca perspective, mind you — but, frankly, not all of it of the nature that has led your faithful (if perpetually absent) blogger/seasonal alpaca breeding manager to feel the need to constantly share.

And look, I will be the first to admit that yours truly has been all over the place on that particular spectrum. Ever since this blog, the primary digital mouthpiece of our farm’s marketing presence, replaced the physically printed and mailed newsletter over 20 years ago now — I can’t say that I miss that effing tabbing machine even a little bit, by the way — I have admittedly vacillated from the unquestionably cringey over-share (commiserating in this very space with our then gelded males over having had my vasectomy and thus working in my office for several days avec ice bag firmly planted in my nether regions), to feeling at other times like something happening in our lives, be it significant events or family travels, are frankly nobody else’s business. Finding that balance of sharing our story in the context of our farm and how that ultimately draws its breath from our respective upbringings, experiences, beliefs, values, etc… without oversharing our story has always been a challenge. Yet here we are.

The most significant change in our professional world over the past year was the retirement of our partners, Ed & Deb Bratton, with whom we had coowned the Vermont Fiber Mill & Studio and that facility’s subsequent closing. In a national fiber processing environment where there’s not exactly an overabundance of fiber processing capacity on that smaller commercial scale, the loss of VFM&S was felt by alpaca folks from across the country. It spoke volumes of the Bratton’s very real acumen for processing and spinning raw alpaca fiber into finished yarns that, other than an initial marketing push announcing our operation, we had never really had to promote that business: it very quickly became a strictly word-of-mouth operation whose product simply spoke for itself. All well and good, but we, CCNF, as the former primary supplier of raw material to a fiber processing business that no longer exists, find ourselves as fleece orphans for the first time in over 15 years. More to come on this point in the not-too-distant future, but I will tease things simply by saying that Jennifer Lutz, with a challenge in front of her and the time and space to address said challenge in a meaningful way, has a way of coming through. Stay tuned.

Elsewhere, we had the first wedding of one of our boys, as our first-born, Sam, married his beloved, Lexi Feinman (now formally Alexis Tressa Lutz), on a magnificent September weekend in York Beach, Maine. Lex had first survived a family vacation with all of us in March of ’20, just a few months after she and Sammy had started dating, only to get pulled into the vortex of riding out the pandemic here on the farm, starting a few short weeks later. Suffice it to say we all love her, and she at least tolerates (joking!) her new in-laws. Love is grand and all of that!

We finished up our super-condensed 5-6 week breeding season way back in July, this time with 30ish confirmed pregnancies at the end of it all. Even if, after a bit of expected attrition, that number has been dialed back 2 or 3 pregnancies, that is still going to be 5 to 6 times the number of crias we had born this year. I have been working with some client-owned females in recent months, just enough so that our Herdsires remember who their favorite human handler is. To review: Ian = happy time. The smart ones, at least, get this decidedly easy math. There’ll be a bit more of that too in the weeks ahead as well, as we begin to work with outside females from parts of the country where hot and humid summer temperatures are the norm and we enter a more friendly future window for those animals to birth out in. Already, Jen and I find ourselves eyeing yearling females and males from our 2023 birth class (looking at you Polly, Groove, Neytiri, and Mjolnir) and spitballing potential breeding matches. So what if it’s taken us almost 28 years and a bit of family trauma over the past 24 months to find our current sweet spot in balancing the farm and its different businesses (animal sales, meat, fiber) with the rest of our life? It is, of course, still a work in progress, but overall, it feels good.

Now apropos of none of the above and under the heading of things perhaps coming full circle: as someone who flew commercially a lot as a child (infamously first flying from Guatemala to Spain at the ripe old age of 3 weeks, with the goofy looking passport to prove it), I always grew up and still have (and love) flying dreams and was obsessed with airplanes as a kid. Now, the dreams of which I speak are not of getting into or onto planes — though there are those too, of course — but first-person, the ground falls away, and YOU ARE FLYING dreams. Did any of that cause our recently married child to become obsessed with flying at the age of 14 himself, get his commercial FAA license before he graduated high school, go to aviation school for college, and now be a commercial ATP pilot, working for a charter operation? Maybe? There is undoubtedly some circumstantial connective tissue there. That the adorable boy/man/pilot then taught his middle-aged father how to operate a small drone with video capabilities, and that, along with a crash course in home video editing from our mutual friend, the amazing Ms. Bari Padgett, et voila: Ian gets to live out his flying dreams in real life! That was the long-winded introduction for the video below, a compilation of a few recent October afternoons gently buzzing our herd and their barns and pastures. If you watch it through, you will see the gigantic roll spots that the various feed groups have made for themselves, particularly on the downhill side of the Arena. For a growing season that started with so much rain that we were still having to mow our paddocks (to help the rotating herd keep them down) as recently as early September, the proverbial spigot was well and truly turned off just around that same time as well. The footage below was shot in the final days of the outside grazing groups being out at all, having now been called back to full-time life, living out of the Arena again as they do every fall and winter. In a matter of weeks that same barn will fall back to it’s winter drylot configuration, it’s radiating paddocks well and truly spent for the season after 5 months of being grazed. Regardless, the reality that I get to consider any of this, drone flying, shooting, and editing to be “work” is one of the most extraordinary things ever. Cannes, Telluride, New York, Toronto, to say nothing of Hollywood, ain’t gonna be calling any time soon, but yours truly had a blast zooming over the southern slope of Mt. Ascutney that we are so lucky to have called our home since the end of 1995 nonetheless. Fly on, my friends…

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