Tuesday 24 November 2009

Wet Alpacas, Wet llamas wet, wet, wet everything

Hi

Change of venue for my diary, hopefully this will work better than my last attempt, you can still see what we have been upto in the past on this link

24th November 09

I shouldn't be moaning we are a lot better of then the poor people of Cumbria but I am so fed up with this weather it is either raining , just stopped raining or just about to rain. The animals look sodden, although they seem happy enough and it is surprising how quick they dry out between showers.
I went over to our fields in Widecombe this morning with a bale of hay for the females, I nearly lost most of it just getting to the hayrack the wind was that strong. I am waiting around until they have all finished eating so as to turn over all the buckets and troughs, this hopefully will prevent any badgers getting into the feeding troughs.

Following the meeting of SWAG last Saturday it is becoming more apparent that we need to up our bio security with respect of TB. Not only on farm but with outside breedings and shows. We have had many discussions as to whether we should be showing next year or not. If we don't we lose the opportunity to meet prospective customers, keeping in touch with other breeders apart from enjoying the whole show scene. Obviously if everyone decided not to show it would be really bad for the whole Alpaca industry and that would not be good for any of us.

We have decided that we will probably show next year but the animals that go to shows will be kept completely separate from the rest of the herd, probably on a different farm. Whether we all have to go down the route of testing is a whole other matter and one that will be the source of much discussion over the next few months.

This still leaves the question of outside matings, we have our own males but would have probably sent a couple of our black females out to stud, we will have to think about this over the winter.

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