March 2009

WELL it has been another long hard winter for us here in the Northern Territory of Idaho. It’s the first day of spring and we still have a great deal of snow on the ground and the areas that we have cleared paths in the fields are flooded with mud and water. Our alpacas have never looked messier. We put up around 200 tons of hay each year however with the number of livestock we own, which includes our cattle and horses we need another 200 to get us through the winter especially when you have a resident group of Elk (60 head this year) that invade your barn nightly eating a ton of hay a night.

Hay is harder to find as many growers have moved to producing corn for ethanol which has made good grass hay scarce and expensive. The hay we used for bedding in previous years had tripled in price so we used regular hay and chaff this year, and sadly I think we have as much hay on the alpacas as we do on the ground. The health of the alpacas is our number one priority, so we suffer a bit more contamination in this years fleece production but we have healthy happy alpacas. Read the rest of Showing in Paddock Condition? »