Legitimate Contender
It is no secret that we are good friends with Ryen and Ursula Munro, the former owners of Tripping Gnome Farm Alpacas. Our two farms also shared a very close business relationship in recent years, owning several of our most prominent Herdsires together, and we were almost always traveling together to major shows in this or that far corner of the country, all for the much ballyhooed purpose of walking in circles. Louisville, KY, Salt Lake City, UT, Oklahoma City, OK, Grand Island, NE…CCNF and TGF saw them all together.
To this day we remain in awe of the breeding program that TGF was able to build in so relatively short a period of time. So it was that when Ryen let us know in the latter half of 2012 that they were thinking of selling their herd and moving on to other things, we had several different reactions here in the Lutz family. We were first and foremost quite sad and kind felt like we had had the wind knocked out of us. These were after all not only our friends, but also our most trusted allies in the alpaca world. On a pragmatic level though, our interest was also definitely peaked. After all, they we’re selling their entire herd. Not that the timing was exactly great for us, personally. Just a few years removed from the worst of the economic downturn, we will freely admit that our first visceral reaction was something along the lines of “Wow, what an amazing opportunity this could be, but there is NO WAY, that we are spending that kind of money on more alpacas right now!” Then we did what anyone would do in such a situation: we did our due diligence and spent some time examining the TGF herd more closely. Not unsurprisingly, we left Freeport after a day of extended show and tell feeling more conflicted than when we had arrived. We knew that chances like that didn’t come along very often. For those unfamiliar with the herd we were looking at, you need to understand that by that time in 2012, TGF had become what was undeniably the best medium sized breeding program in the country. They had quality, they had real depth, and more importantly – they knew what to do with it. So when after several weeks of hemming and hawing on our part — do we or don’t we? — we were ultimately offered a chance to essentially skim off the very top of their foundation herd, it was an opportunity that we finally decided there was no way we were going to pass up. Damn the torpedoes and all of that.
In the end, 12 alpacas from the Tripping Gnome herd would join the ranks here. Prominent amongst the gems that we drafted into our program, was TGF’s young fawn Snowmass Sub-Zero son, Legit. Even though he was only a cria at his dam’s side at that time, it didn’t matter to us in the least. The truly great ones almost always project their quality quite early and with this young fellow there simply was no doubting his attributes. The nexus of fineness and density was impossible to miss from the first time we got a chance to open up his fleece and put our hands on him. As the maternal son of NM Layla (AKA the full sibling of multiple Champion Herdsire, NM Beethoven), he also possessed genetics on both sides of his pedigree that we had long admired from afar but still lacked to a great degree at that time within our own breeding program. After all, so much of our big picture strategy these days is about seeking out those puzzle piece alpacas that we can plug into our breeding program, that will be complimentary to the the genetic lines which we already possess. Needless to say that as Legit approaches his 2nd birthday in 2014, we are very excited about the prospects for this coming breeding season!
We are also proud to announce that as of January of 2014 we now co own TGF Legit with Pamela Brewster of Stillmeadow Farm in Stonington, CT! Legit will be joining both CCNF Archangel and Snowmass Conopa’s Kahuna in ferrying back and forth between their beach home in Connecticut and their mountain home in Vermont in the years ahead! You can read about TGF Legit some more on the CCNF website here.
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