The Farm Sitting Conundrum

Finding someone that you trust to look after your alpacas when you are not home is one of the biggest challenges that many people face. If you are lucky enough to find a person that is attentive and does a really good job though, treat them well as they are worth their weight in gold!

For the better part of a decade now we have had full time staff that work for us at CCNF. Their responsibilities range from the mundane but important (daily cleanup and feeding, mowing, snow removal) to the absolutely critical (delivering newborns and managing the herd’s overall health). It is one big reason that in 2011 we are able to spend some time away from the farm without too many worries. Such was not always the case though. There was a time when we had a herd of roughly 70 alpacas, including 25 pregnant females, and there was a staff of two: Jen and I.

For the most part she was the brains and I was the muscle, something which some of our friends would still claim is true, especially the brains part. I quietly invite those friends to shove it. In any case, our memories of that last year or two before we (read: Jen) took the lovely plunge into the bracing waters of the human resource pool are primarily that we felt stretched very thin. Every hour of the day was precious. Though it’s all rather funny now, we both remember thinking that it was all a bit too much when while doing a breeding at 10:30PM (the only time that was free that one day) in the Main Barn above our house one night, we heard a soft knock on the barn door only to find that our then 2 year old son, Sam, had woken up, seen lights on at the barn, and toddled up the pitch-dark hill  in his pajamas and his little chore boots. All very cute…but it gave us pause. It was soon after that that we hired our first full-time farm help in the form of all around good soul, Callie Willis.

The other major obstacle that we had to deal with in those early years of the farm (prior to Callie’s arrival) was what to do when we went away. Leaving aside the question of vacations during the offseason — which we did somehow manage to pull off, probably by throwing caution to the wind  — there was alway the issue of just going off to shows and leaving the farm at a time of the year when some females were approaching their due dates.  Most often the person left minding the fort was someone for who this was, at best, a part time way to earn a little beer money, if not a family member or friend who was far too nice to say “no!” when we would ask them how they’d feel about playing alpaca farmer for 3 to 5 days. We did learn over time by trial and error though that there were some things we could do to make our life, the life of the person we were leaving in charge of the farm, as well as the whole experience of leaving the farm itself a lot less stressful. Below is a list of those things in no particular order…

1. We would spend a good deal of time with our farm sitters doing farm chores with them and showing them how we liked to clean up the barns and pastures and feed the animals. Having said that, we also learned that unless one was planning on paying this person (or people) a king’s ransom, it was best to dial back one’s expectations of how one would find the farm upon returning home. It’s your barn and your alpacas, not theirs: the chances of someone getting everything tidied up just so were rather slim. While it was important that a farm sitter get  the macro/big picture stuff right, the reality was that we usually spent at least a day or two getting the farm whipped back into fighting shape after we got home. If all animals were fed, more or less healthy, and in their proper pens/paddocks then we found that that was really sufficient in the final analysis.

2. We would always talk to our farm sitters about what could go wrong while they were in charge and how to handle it, even if “handling it” just meant raising the proverbial SOS flag and calling for help. Though it was something we really only started doing over the last 6 or 7 years (nowadays every alpaca born at CCNF is given a unique ear tag and # around 2 months of age that corresponds to both it’s birth year and gender: left ear female, right ear male), hindsight being 20/20 we would definitely also recommend that owners have some form of identification on their alpacas that the farm sitters can refer to, particularly in an emergency. Even if it’s just temporary collars with name tags that you take off again upon returning home, it just needs to be utilitarian. Though we did, and still do, know each of our animals on sight by name, that is not really the job of a temporary farm sitter, especially if we’re talking about a herd of 20+ animals.

Where birthing was concerned we always created a sheet with pretty detailed instructions and a semi-flow chart feel to it to help guide them in the event that they encountered either a female in labor or a newborn already on the ground. We also kept a very well marked “birthing box,” in the barn which contained everything they would need for such an eventuality (hairdryer, towel, lube, thermometer, cria coat, etc…). We also plastered all over those instruction sheets any relevant  phone #s for them to call whether it was an emergency or they just had a question about something they were seeing. Those numbers obviously included our cell, as well as the number of our then equally stretched but ever gracious vet, Steve Purdy (a one man army, pickup driving practice). When in doubt, the farm sitters were instructed to send the proverbial bat signal Steve’s way — he was often as much as an hour away but would gladly talk people through stuff over the phone as he made his way over — then give us a holler to let us know what was happening.

The other common alpaca medical issues we would try to get our farm sitters prepped to deal with were choke, colic, and diarrhea. For the first two we would encourage our farm sitters to call us and then the vet if they saw anything that raised an alarm, such as a down animal that really wasn’t wanting to get up and go out with it’s pen mates. We didn’t have any expectation in those days that the folks we were leaving in charge would be comfortable giving any injections, never mind tubing a choking animal. Luckily, though things such as choke can look horrific they can, in most cases, often wait until a vet arrives without too much added risk. Where diarrhea was concerned we would always encourage them to call us first to tell us what they were seeing. Though we did also make a point of keeping a jumbo-sized bottle of Pepto Bismol handy along with an oral dose syringe so that they could, with a little guidance from afar, at least start to address the symptom. Again we weren’t expecting anyone to play microbiologist and solve something like that completely, just hold the fort with a medicinal band-aid until the the proverbial cavalry could get back home to really tackle any underlying problem(s).

3. Where farm machinery and equipment was concerned we learned to set things up so that there would be as little need of it as possible. If I crashed my farm tractor into a fence post I would feel like a nit-wit but at least I’d done it to my own equipment and property. Conversely, getting a call while at a show a day’s drive away that the garage door on the barn had just been remodeled “a la John Deere” would have left a bad taste in one’s mouth. We would try to leave things so that our farm sitters weren’t having to operate anything they weren’t comfortable with. There is after all not much damage that can be done with shovels, wheel barrows, rakes, and pooper scoopers compared to tractors and skid steers.

4. We would make it very clear — especially with due females and/or newborns on the ground — that we needed everyone in the herd to be checked on first thing in the morning @ 6AM, several times throughout the day (at least every couple of hours ideally) and a final time @ 9PM before going to bed. That of course didn’t guarantee that there wouldn’t be a birth or some other happening in between those checks but it played the odds pretty well, particularly if the person doing the checking had some idea of what they were looking for.

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Really the ideal farm sitter is someone who is conscientious, observant, communicative, and knows — perhaps most importantly — when they are seeing something that they are unsure of and won’t be shy about asking for help. It’s not necessary for a good farm sitter to have had prior alpaca experience, just that they have a good sense for animals in general. We all know people who have that (we also all know people of have NONE of it too, unfortunately some of them own animals anyway) and with just a little guidance one of those people can be trained very easily to look after a small to medium sized alpaca herd. Who knows, you might even create a convert in the process!