It was back in the late summer or early fall of last year, when the idea first began to percolate as something more than just a fanciful throw-away line: why don’t we go to Nationals in Denver next March? There were of course any number of perfectly reasonable retorts to that query, not the least…
Hello and greetings from the currently snowy and chilly side of the freezing/thawing see-saw that Mother Nature has gifted us here so far in 2019. Applying the jinx here of course but we actually had a period of more sustained cold towards the end of November than we had in late December (oh 2018, we…
“…All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” – J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring I am not a fan of back to back show weekends. In fact, I am really more whatever the opposite of a fan is. Though a condensed spring show season such…
There are few things more obviously joyous and playful that we as alpaca breeders get to witness than the post-show pasture pronk the show team animals inevitably go on whenever we first get home from an event and they get off of the trailers and run out into their respective paddocks, often greeted by their…
Greetings from the far side of birthing season! Seems like just yesterday that Jen and I were coming up with breeding assignments — which Herdsires would breed with which females — for the 2017 season and that she and our herd manager, Kim Duprey, were staring down a list of some 75+ due females for…
Most everyone that has raised alpacas for any considerable length of time has an origin story of sorts. Ours began with Jennifer’s senior year environmental engineering project in Ecuador for Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where the mere idea — said mostly as a joke — of “a couple of llamas for the backyard one day” was…
