North American show recap

There is considerable history for us with the North American Alpaca Show, the vast majority of it good. For starters, having helped to run the show itself throughout its first 10 years of existence, it has managed to ingrain/ingratiate itself into our little family’s annual rhythm. In fact as I was coming to around 5:15 Saturday morning (time to make the donuts show the alpacas), it occurred to me that now at the age of 41 that Jen and I have both spent more than a quarter of our thus-far allotted first weekends in April at the NAAS. I guess we’ve been at this for a while? It’s all good though.

Though Jen and I arrived with the show string on Thursday to set everything up, I had to scatter my arse back north to Vermont on late Friday morning to pick up our boys and take them to their school’s annual spring music night. Meanwhile Jen and our Herd Manager, Kim Duprey, stuck around the show venue, helping with the color checking at the show all day long. The team was all back together again in Springfield by late that night though: a little knackered but ready to do its thing over the next couple of days.

Of course regardless of how well a show goes, it’s hard not to feel a palpable sense of relief when it’s all over with too. “Well, at least we don’t have to think about that for another 10.5 months or so…” So it was Sunday night around 6:30 when Sam and I backed the large trailer up to the garage doors on the front of the Main Barn here on the farm and disgorged 34 show animals back into their pens. Moments later Jen, Max, and our small trailer arrived carrying the 9 older males in our string, including favorite son CCNF Elixir, who has temporarily returned home again after a winter spent cooling his heels at his co owners’ farm in Maryland. Judging by their behavior, the alpacas were just as happy to be back on the farm as the humans were. Something about the dust, the din of the show venue, and the lovely chlorinated water of the Eastern States Expo that no doubt made our collective heart go pitter-patter down there at the NAAS…

So did you add that number up yet though? That was kind of silly. We were brain-dead enough that we purposefully brought 43 alpacas to a show. Granted, the NAAS is as close as we get to a “local” show. It’s only an hour and forty minutes straight down I-91, technically speaking even a tiny bit closer than the Vermont show we attend in the fall. With myself, Jennifer, and Sammy as well as our old friends Dave Serino and Pat Badger (the Ring-Walker lives!) all going into the show rings, Kimmy spent most of the day Saturday and Sunday playing pit boss and shuttling animals to and from our show pens, just feeding the handlers animals and number cards in the holding areas. It was a little seat-of-the-pants at times but all in all it worked out in the end. As the person who did the least amount of work on the training of the 25 rookies that were part of that show string, I also want to take a moment to toot Jen and Kim’s horn just a little. The only troublesome animals in the entire show string were the hormonal older males who were theoretically already trained, while the weaners for the most part behaved like seasoned pros. Perhaps we’ve (Jen and Kim) learned a thing or two about show training too in 16 years of playing this game we love?

Though we were of course pleased with the 2 Color Championships (white male and female) and 3 Reserve Color Championships (white female, light male, grey male) that our critters won, in some ways the more impressive take away may be that of the 43 individual CCNF animals that walked into the show ring over the course of the weekend, 42 of them left it with a ribbon. That’s not counting the production classes (Produce of Dam, Get of Sire, and Breeder’s Best 3) that we also won. We’ve always droned on about consistent results over time being the true measure of any breeding program’s quality and staying power but how about consistent finishes right across the color spectrum (all right not quite, we didn’t have any blacks, multis, or indefinites) at a single show? We’d have to be even more brain dead not to be at least somewhat satisfied with those results as well.

The North American marked the rather conspicuous debut of a large group of CCNF’s first Matrix Majesty crias, all of whom were born in 2012. Those accustomed to seeing our show pens filled with nothing but predominantly white/light alpacas could be forgiven for doing a double take at the large double pens filled with fawn and brown juveniles. Though none of them managed to win one of those lovely rectangular things, several of them did win their respective classes and as they mature those fleeces are only going to get more interesting, not less so. Stay tuned.

Last weekend was also a shining moment for a small group of our young females all of whom — not by chance mind you — bear the names of their famous and prepotent (and alas, deceased) grand-dams. CCNF Capuchin, CCNF Pachelbel, CCNF Tessora, CCNF Jesusa, and last but not least, CCNF Prestige all won at least a blue ribbon (Prestige and baby Tess were the white Champ and RC respectively) and made us all very proud in the process. The genetic legacies of their female ancestors, most of whom had joined our foundation herd over ten years ago, are in very good hands. Speaking of oldies but goodies: do you think, by the way, that it’s any coincidence that 3 of those 5 females were also Archangel grandkids as well? Just saying.

In between the actual showing over the weekend, we also got to catch up with the many old friends that we have in the alpaca world, as well as meet a ton of new people and even talk some business. Apparently our decision to temporarily offer a 10% discount off of our wholly-owned stud services last weekend caught people’s attention, as we left the show with no fewer than 5 new commitments for outside breedings this coming season. We’ve always enjoyed talking shop with new and experienced breeders alike, whether actually putting our hands on the animals themselves (Invictus was conveniently down there with us in person and won a blue ribbon for himself in addition to being part of Precocious’ winning Get) or just discussing different genetic lines more in the abstract. We’ve always felt that showing is far and away the most direct and effective form of marketing for our breeding program — I’ll trade you 10 full page ads in any industry magazine for one good show weekend any day — and last weekend was a perfect example. Quality and consistency, as always, speak for themselves.

Lastly, we want to offer huge thanks and congratulations to Dee and Don Sherman of Arrow Acres Farm for their purchase over the weekend of our beautiful grey Herdsire (Reserve Champion too at the 2013 NAAS) and Ring of Fire son, CCNF Smoke Ring. Though we were always prepared to keep Smoker at home in the immediate future, perhaps breeding him to the odd female and offering him for outside stud services, he will admittedly go to far greater and better use in a breeding program that has more than one unrelated grey female. We really look forward to seeing what he can do for the Shermans in the years ahead!

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