The exodus from the winter/spring dry lots has begun in earnest here at CCNF. After more than a month of having to keep animals off of the pastures at the Main Barn for reasons mostly related to keeping their fleeces clean, Sunday there was a mass stampede as all of the feed groups charged out…
Oh the joy that is parasite management on an alpaca farm! Jen and Kim have spent the past several weeks meticulously going through the entire herd, one feed group at a time, doing fecal tests on every alpaca on the farm. Unfortunately there is no cool and easy way to get those individual samples other…
The farm today feels and looks a bit like my imagined vision of Ireland: very wet and very green. Unfortunately it’s missing the fun-loving carousing and singing from the local pub. Perhaps there’s something that can be done to address that? The yearling boys that were kicked out of the Main Barn late last week…
The Arena and Main Barn are slowly but surely starting to empty out as we begin the process of sending roughly half of the herd out to pastures away from the buildings themselves. From my office window in fact I can see our rather small group of yearling males happily munching on almost 10″ of…
Days like today on the farm quite literally make you happy to be alive! Perhaps it’s partly still the affect of post-shearing euphoria — as in “naya, naya, naya: we don’t have to do that again for 12 months” — but with the birds making their spring symphony, a wonderful breeze, 60 degrees, and nary…
There are signs of life appearing in the pastures here. Just 10 days ago the majority of our fields were still a tannish brown. Now all of a sudden after a week or relatively mild, if not warm, weather and a couple of days of soaking rain it seems the grass in our pastures is…
