I read today that the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said that it had launched an emergency operation to save 18,000 Peruvian alpacas at risk of dying and endangering local livelihoods.

The organisation's branch in Peru has doled out 36,800 doses of treatment to alpacas owned by poor farmers in the country's highlands, where livestock are suffering due to a severe cold spell.

"Forced to go without food, perhaps for days at a time, their alpacas have become weak and susceptible to disease," said Marc Vandersmissen, FAO's Emergency Coordinator in Peru.

Cold weather arrived three months earlier than expected in the Peruvian highlands this year, preventing farmers from harvesting crops and from feeding the alpaca upon which many derive their entire livelihood.

The national government of Peru declared a state of emergency in 11 of Peru's 25 provinces in response to the situation. Funded by the government of Belgium, FAO's emergency relief came in the form of anti-parasitic medication, antibiotics and vitamins delivered between July 14 and 19 in coordination with Peru's National agricultural safety service.

Practical Action have been working with alpaca farmers in Peru for some years now. Practical Action technical staff teach locals about alpaca husbandry and farming techniques such as irrigation.

The training is delivered in Quecha the local language , the topics include general animal health as well as specific training for alpaca herders. This training takes one year and participants are given a certificate. Once trained, then they join the Association of Kamayoqs, which meets 6 times a year for 'revision classes'. About 240 Kamayoqs have been trained (approx. 20 -25 a year) since 1996.

Having discovered on Friday that Minne is open we started to breed her again today.



We will repeat this every week now until we get a spit off from Minne which should be a good indication that she is pregnant. She did spit off two weeks ago so I was fearing that she may have a retained CL which was fooling her into thinking she is pregnant. But the fact she went down so easily today makes me certain she is open.

A breeding each week is just about right as alpaca breeding causes some trauma to the female alpaca internally. What you want to avoid is breeding so frequently that you get bleeding. This is to be avoided for two reasons; firstly bleeding can lead to infection but also because blood is fatal for sperm...so even a good breeding can prove unsuccessful if blood is present in the uterus.

My eldest boy Jamie has just come back from a camping trip to the Yellowstone National Park and took some great pictures and I just wanted to share three of those here on the alpaca blog.







Hope you like them.

This years alpaca show is on August 2nd and 3rd, 2008 – the AFCNA (Alpaca Fiber
Cooperative of North America) are the sponsors and this is the third annual AFCNA Continental Fleece Show, which is the largest independent Alpaca Fleece Show in the world.

Apart from showing fleeces there are some interesting seminars


How to Manage the Future of the Fiber Industry
By Al Beatty, Belasera Alpacas,

How to set up Your Farm Store
By Brian Chavez, Peruvian Perfection,

Fleece Preparation for Processing
By Heather Arenas, Long Skinny Ranch,

Marketing 101 – How to get Free PR for Your Farm
By Robin Gilmore, Illusion Ranch Alpacas,

I am not entirely sure how this has happened but I am scheduled to give a web based webinar about alpaca EPDs on August 6th - here are the details if you are interested....

EPD Webinar: A World View
Alpacas EPDs Webinar: Presented by Adrian Stewart, Mulberry Alpacas and the membership of the Ideal Alpaca Community. Venturing from his native England, Adrian started Mulberry Alpacas in Ashland, Oregon in 2004 and in 2005 he accepted the role of Editor for the Ideal Alpaca Community Newsletter.

Adrian will discuss genetic improvement programs from around the world…

You can enroll for this informative webinar at the AlpacaInstitute@NWA

5:00PM Pacific Time - Login instructions provided upon registration. Invite your fellow breeders to participate.

Several of you have asked more about growing lavender and how to get started. Well I am no lavender expert but here is some basic advice and a few references if you want to read more. How does this tie in with Alpacas? Well it doesn't directly but its all part of making the most of your farm. Alpaca or otherwise.

Lavender is a nice potential niche crop, although two things come to mind first. One is to really research the market for lavender and find out what you are actually going to do with the flowers – sell them dried, fresh, for oils, make soap, and so forth. Doing thorough market research and talking with potential buyers would be an important first step before planting lavender.

I’d also counsel anyone to proceed slowly and start with an acre or less and see how the plants do on your property, how the markets shape up, etc. It is risky to put in many hundreds of lavender plants without first having an adequate business plan and marketing plan in place.

It is also wise to start small and build from a small acreage if you find success with this crop.

There are a number of resources on the web.

The Oregon Small Farms website has some resources on lavender:

WSU has a whole page on production and marketing:

ATTRA has information on growing lavender as well:

Many thanks to Melissa Mathewson at the OSU Small Farms Extension
Southern Oregon Research & Extension Center

Dr Leslie Richardson was here today to ultrasound Minne , draw some blood and implant some microchips in younger alpacas.

And we were half way successful. We did ultrasound Minne but she turns out not to be pregnant so we will have to breed her again and then scan her again in 30 days or so.

Minne's new owner Bill was here with his father aslo called Bill to see the ultrasound and check up on the three alpacas that will be the start of a new alpaca herd once their barn is completed.





I am almost out of micros chips - in fact I am totally out of chips so better see what is happening to the bulk order that SOJAA were going to place...

Our 10 acre hay field is quite a bit of work and after all the cost of contractors yields only about $1500 each year even with two cuttings.

This is why I have been looking into Lavender production and out of interest here are the numbers I am playing around with:

Spacing between rows
Between rows: 4 ft., with a range of 3-6 ft
Between plants: 1-3 ft., 30" most common
3,000 - 5,000 plants per acre - 4,000 is about average.

Price of plants
Plugs: 128 plug tray $50-60, less for large quantities ($30-40).
2" pots: $3-$4 retail, $1.50-2.00 large quantities.
4" larger pots:- $4-$6, large quantities for around $3.00

This gives a total planting cost of about $10,000 with plugs and at the other exrtreme $120,00 for 4" pots.

The irrigation system would cost about $5,000 by the time it was complete. With drip irrigation it is VITAL to have a thorough filtering of the water or the drippers will clog up in no time.

Flower yields – Grosso
Approximately 150 stems per bundle
4-7 bundles per plant - 5-6 on average
12-15 bundles to yield a pound of dried buds
Buds per plant - 1/4 to 1/2 lb. per plant dried buds
Bundles per acre 4,000 x 5 = 20,000
Buds per acre: 1,000 - 1,500 pounds dried buds per acre

Oil production
Angustifolia's yield between 3 and 15 quarts of oil per acre (about 5 to 25 lbs.)
Lavandin's yield between 20 and 95 quarts of oil per acre (about 35 to 180 lbs.).

Wholesale prices for lavandin oil, are around $35/pint as far as I can make out.
Thus, on the wholesale market, lavandin varieties will generate around $2800 to $6650 per acre for oil production.

It is highly unlikely that most U.S. lavender producers can compete in the wholesale essential oil business with producers in some other parts of the world. Oil production for small US producers should be aimed at high quality, value-added markets.

Which is where our sister web sire Mulberry Health will come in handy.

As the name suggests MyAlpacaRecords is a new system designed to help farmers of alpacas maintain accurate records.

Using the new system you can maintain a sales lists of your alpacas, health records, breeding records, photographs and the system is backed up each evening.

The system was designed by Dale Thoeni. he has been raising alpacas since 1997. As a Systems Engineer by trade Dale started to explore developing a software program that would help alpaca farmers keep better records.
As others have done before, he began to create a software package that could be sold to other alpaca enthusiasts. Dale soon realized that an Internet based application would be more effective than mailing out a disk.

Basically, MyAlpacaRecords is a website with a a database driven application. A bit like AlpacaNation. Except Dale is focusing on the record keeping aspect rather than the sales and marketing angle. Having said that he does promise online auctions and to cap it all he says his long term goal is to

"create a national alpaca herd data repository from which we can provide Alpaca producers with statistical data regarding the production of alpacas."

Well isn't that what ARI does? But I am guessing they won't be losing any sleep about MyAlpacaRecords taking over the national registry just yet.

Its hard to see how the system works without actually subscribing as the demo is very basic and there is no free trial period, a big mistake in my book as nearly all applications of this type use a free trial period to build their customer base. The system looks like a serious case of function over form which is what you might expect when its been built by a systems engineer. Bottom line it looks uninteresting but the good news is it will probably work very well. Check out the website and if you sign up let me know how it goes.

At this time of year everything is coming to its peak and it really is a great time of year to be working and living on the land. The young alpacas spend their evenings pronking around the paddocks and testing the patience of their mothers to the limit.

After a false start earlier in the year where insufficient members voted for the election to be valid a new vote was taken. The new members were announced on this site last week.

A meeting of the AOBA Board of Directors was held in Nashville this weekend and AOBA Board officers were elected for the year 2008 - 2009. The officers are as follows:

David Barboza, President
Tim McCarty, Vice President
Ian Watt, Secretary
Jerry Forstner, Treasurer

Retiring from the AOBA Board of Directors after two consecutive three year terms were Amy McCroskie and Steve Hull.
What perhaps isn't widely known, yet is that the last meeting of the old board approved an amendment to the effect that board members cannot also be judges and so David Barboza and Ian Watt when he qualifies as a judge will have to decide if they want to be on the board or if they want to judge alpacas.....

David decided to stay on the board and become the President...thus giving up his alpaca judging. Not quite sure when the judging has to stop as David is scheduled to judge our alpaca show Alpacamania 2008 in October so if he can't do it we will need to find an alternative PDQ....

For those of you who are wise enough to be learning all you can about EPDs here is some exciting news about Expected Progeny Differences....

Northwest Alpacas is offering two new educational programs to help you understand and use Expected Progeny Differences.
Participating in these programs will give you critical information on this important new tool that provides a means to accelerate the development of superior fiber bearing alpacas.

The All New EPD Seminar
This seminar will be held at Northwest Alpacas in Hillsboro, OR. Lunch is included.
Sat., August 2, 2008, 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM PDT
Presented by Mike Safley and Fred Kraft, Northwest Alpacas
Understanding & Using the IAC’s Expected Progeny Difference Program

Price: $75

New 4-part EPD Webinar Series
This series is offered as a package of four two hour webinars. They are held on four consecutive Wednesdays from 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM Pacific Daylight Time. Price is $99 for the 4-part series.

Part 1:
Wed., July 23, 2008
Presented by Dr. Sarah Via, University of Maryland
Expected Progeny Differences and Their Use in Alpaca Breeding

Part 2:
Wed., July 30, 2008
Presented by Dr. David Notter, Virginia Tech
Implementation of Genetic Evaluation Methods for U.S. Alpacas

Part 3:
Wed., August 6, 2008
Presented by Adrian Stewart, Mulberry Alpacas
EPDs - A World View

Part 4:
Wed., August 13, 2008
Presented by Mike Safley, Northwest Alpacas
EPDs and the Ideal Alpaca Community

One of those rare occasions when we are off the alpaca farm at the weekend.



Today we are in downtown Portland for the annual Young Entrepreneurs Business Week.Or YEBW as it is known.

YEBW is a unique and inspiring one week summer camp for students, grades 9-12.

YEBW is about staying on a college campus immersed in running your own business, facing real challenges, setting real-life goals and preparing yourself for the future.
It’s intense and the students I spoke with all said it was great fun....

Check out the website and maybe get involved with a similar scheme in your area?

Today I am heading north to Portland with Jo.
We are going to do some non alpaca work in the green city. Did you know Portland is the greenest city in the USA? With San Fransisco in second place.

1. Portland, Oregon. 23.1
Electricity: 7.1 Transportation: 6.4 Green Living: 4.8 Recycling/Perspective: 4.8
America’s top green city has it all: Half its power comes from renewable sources, a quarter of the workforce commutes by bike, carpool or public transportation, and it has 35 buildings certified by the U.S. Green Building Council.

2. San Francisco, California. 23.0
Electricity: 6.8 Transportation: 8.8 Green Living: 3.5 Recycling/Perspective: 3.9
See how San Francisco turns wasted roof space into power, here.

How the Rankings Work:
Raw data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Geographic Society’s Green Guide, which collected survey data and government statistics for American cities of over 100,000 people in more than 30 categories, including air quality, electricity use and transportation habits. We then compiled these statistics into four broad categories, each scored out of either 5 or 10 possible points. The sum of these four scores determines a city’s place in the rankings.

Electricity (E; 10 points): Cities score points for drawing their energy from renewable sources such as wind, solar, biomass and hydroelectric power, as well as for offering incentives for residents to invest in their own power sources, like roof-mounted solar panels.

Transportation (T; 10 points): High scores go to cities whose commuters take public transportation or carpool. Air quality also plays a role.

Green living (G; 5 points): Cities earn points for the number of buildings certified by the U.S. Green Building Council, as well as for devoting area to green space, such as public parks and nature preserves.

Recycling and green perspective (R; 5 points): This measures how comprehensive a city’s recycling program is (if the city collects old electronics, for example) and how important its citizens consider environmental issues.

Want to read about more green cities? Then follow this link.

Having run irrigation on the newly mown hay field this week it soon became apparent that the irrigation ditches were in need of some TLC (tender loving care).

This morning we set about cleaning out the ditches and of course having run water all day Monday and Tuesday they were kind of wet and muddy...so it was very important not to let the tractor slip in while ploughing (plowing for my American readers) the ditches.

Just as you should never think about the bunker in golf - you should never think about the ditch.....as it will draw you in like a magnet..



I jumped off - but I think there was little chance it would roll over, still...better safe than sorry.

Of course Macario thought it was hilarious and only stopped laughing when I tried to take his picture...



The tractor was rescued by the Expedition which when in 4 wheel drive low ratio will pull just about anything... a lesson learnt.