Today I delivered a very attractive dark brown female alpaca of ours called Mia Sorella to Happy Valley the home of Al, Jan & Aaron, Julie Vizina. Here she will be bred to SRR Kashino a very handsome male who's offspring are winning blue ribbons on a regular basis.







Adrian Stewart

Well not exactly a whole vet day but almost!
I had quite a list of tasks for our vet Dr Tara Timpson to work on with her assistant Anita.
We had medicals for girls going away to be bred, fighting teeth to be checked on the boys and a couple of microchips to insert. Along the way I wanted to look at a couple of skin blemishes and two animals recovering from mite infestations.

Everything was pretty much routine apart from a dreaded microchip issue where we could not find a chip we had implanted earlier but did find one that we didn't even know was there.....all of which consumed a good deal of valuable time and effort.

One of the females I was planning to take to Portland tomorrow will not be going after all. We noticed during shearing that she had a couple of small lumps on her side. Dr Timpson decided it would be best to remove the smaller lump and send it to the lab to determine what it was.




The female is given a sedative and a couple of shots of local anesthetic on either side of the lump.











The small growth turns out to be nothing more than a pustule which could be caused by something as simple as a ingrowing hair.

Dr Timpson stitches up the wound ,disinfects the site and apples fly repellent. The stitches can come out after 10 days.

I obviously haven't checked the fighting teeth soon enough as one boy is the victin af a nasty neck bite and it will need dressing with Nolvasan each day until it heals

Off to Portland tomorow. So the Blog may get behind slightly while I am away.

Adrian Stewart

The alpacas although tolerating the rain are now starting to get just a little fed up with it...that's obviously my view of their experience... but please just trust me on this point.

Meanwhile in the hay meadow, a term I use loosely, as it is slowly but surely becoming more like a lake than a meadow is now home to several ducks.





Tomorrow Dr Tara Timpson our vet is coming to do a series of tasks including blood draws and health checks prior to the transport of five open female alpacas off the farm for breeding. Today we took faecal samples from the females and I delivered them to the lab, so we will have the results tomorrow. I expect them to be clear but with all this warm wet weather you can never be certain.

Some of the intact alpaca boys are getting older now so need to have their "fighting teeth" cut off. Unlike the grass eating teeth they do not grow back. When male alpacas fight they tend to go for the legs and genitals so a sharp incisor can do quite a bit of damage.

We will also check over the alpacas now that they have been shorn as you can obviously see the skin and spot any blemishes much more easily.

Adrian Stewart

Well I guess it was my fault, putting in an irrigation system for the trees in our small orchard.

So now it is raining again and I mean raining cats and dogs, not the odd shower.

The locals can offer no explanation for whats happening with the weather at this time of year, but as always they say with a smile "If you don't like it now, just wait 5 minutes and something else will be along very soon."

The alpacas aren't bothered either as there is little wind and the temperature is in the 60's.

On the 2nd of June I found some great pictures on an Australian Alpaca owners web site which really caught my attention so I posted them on my Blog.



Today we received a newspaper cutting from great friends of ours back in the UK showing the pictures of young Rory and his rugby loving alpaca had been printed in one of the daily papers back in England. The Daily Mail, circulation 2.5 million.



Now that is some great alpaca publicity and maybe its not the power of the Internet... but power of a great photographic image......so all we need now is a charming young American that plays American football with his pet alpaca...anyone out there know of such a child?

Adrian Stewart

In my Blog I don't want to name the people who visit the farm, and anyway as I said yesterday it doesn't really matter who they are or where they are from, what matters is what makes them different from other visitors and what makes them the same.

The group today could not have been more different (Not right nor wrong or even better or worse), just different from the group that visited yesterday.

Today the touching of the alapcas and their behaviour was all important and the decision making appeared much much more subjective and emotional. Which just goes to show that there is great variety among potential alpaca breeders.

So always strive to remain felxible in your views and open minded when it comes to alpaca selection methods. It can be so easy to see "our own methods" whatever they may be, as the only correct way of doing something and ultimately that can be very limiting when you are deaing with hundreds of other breeders.


Adrian Stewart

Today we went about our usual Saturday alpaca chores and in addition we pepared for a farm visit in the afternoon. The people who arrived had found us via the internet and we had swapped e-mails for a few days and sent additional pictures of the alpacas they are interested in.

It doesn't really matter who they are or where they were from.

What was striking was that they were vey well prepared and had done a great deal of homework before arriving at the farm. Their examination of the alpacas was comprehensive and they asked many many questions about the animals and explored our thoughts on alpacas and alpaca breeding. If I didn't know otherwise I would have thought that they had been in the business years.




We are waiting for histograms back on the alpacas that they are interested in so we will have to be patient to see if they are interested in making an offer on an alpaca or two at that time.

The visit lasted 4 hours about 2 of which were spent in the paddocks and barn handling male and female alpacas and their fleeces. A further two hours were spent chatting around the kitchen table. They were charming company and the time just flew by. But then it always does when you are talking with people who are so enthusiastic and excited about alpacas and the alpaca industry. Its days like today that make it all worthwhile.



Adrian Stewart

I spent most of the morning putting in 600 feet of 1/2 inch drip watering for the trees in the orchard. We lost quite a few last year and this year was not looking good. But now we can relax knowing they will be getting watered even when we forget or are just too busy with the alpacas!

I had always put the job off based on expense and effort but the whole project cost less than $100 and took about three hours to instal. With the cost of fruit trees being quite expensive its a wise investment of time and money which I should have made last year.
Another lesson learnt!

Speaking of lessons and learning, that leads me right into the afternoon and evening which I spent at Ashland High School graduation. We don't have anything comparable in Europe which is a real shame. In the UK you take exams then go home and your results arrive in the post some weeks later, if the exam grades are good you get to go to university.

I loved the American experience I thought it was truly wonderful. Something that should be exported to Europe sometime.




Adrian Stewart

In response to my Blog yesterday about naming alpacas several people have sent in suggestions which is great! At least two wanted to know why we called our farm Mulberry Alpacas. Well there is a connection I guess and here it is.

Mulberry trees and Alpacas ? what?s the connection?

In the 1850?s when alpaca fibre was first processed commercially to worsted by Sir Titus Salt, he described his new lustrous fabric as ?alpaca - silk for the price of wool??
Silk, like alpaca, is an animal fibre. Around 3,000 BC, about the time the Incas were enjoying the benefits of domesticated alpacas, the Chinese became the first people to understand how to raise and manufacture silk. The mulberry tree was cultivated to provide food for the silkworms.

There - that is the connection between mulberry trees and alpacas!

But the real answer is that we just picked the name out of thin air and Val a friend of ours came up with our logo and we loved it.




Adrian Stewart

The other night I was watching one of my favourite movies, when I arrived at the point where the US soldier (played by Kevin Costner) is given his Sioux name, Dances With Wolves, and and I started to think through the alpaca names that we all dream up.

Many alpaca farms now have a prefix in front of the alpacas name. So all the alpacas born here will have the pre-fix MBY which is an abbreviation of Mulberry.

As for the actual names themselves we have decided to use song titles for our alpacas names. So we have a Moon River and Mr Bo Jangles and even Mr Tambourine Man...we are not the first farm to use these song titles for names but we are certainly the only farm to only use song titles for names. My thinking behind this was to have names that would immediately sound familiar....time will tell if this is worthwhile or not.

Some alpaca farms that have been around for years prefix-fix with the farm name. So Snowmass Alpacas will for example call an alpaca Snowmass Invincible. This is an excellent idea if you have been around for a good number of years and have established a distinctive look to your alpacas.

There is a school of thought that males and especially stud males should have macho sounding names such as King Kong or Invincible....but there is no hard proof that this is in any way beneficial.

At least one alpaca was named as a humorous response to an insult. When a group of breeders were called "blood suckers" one of the group just had to name his next cria Dracula!

Will we still be naming alpacas when there are 5 million alpacas in North America and the biggest farms have maybe 50,000 animals?

Almost certainly not. By then your run of the mill alpaca will simply have a micro chip number.

I think the alpaca world will be less colourful as a result..

So if you have song titles that would suit an alpaca let me know adrian@mulberryalpacas.com.

Adrian Stewart

Following on from yesterdays Blog I was chatting on the phone with Mike Safely of NorthWest Alpacas about the complete lack of sales training in this industry.

Having started life with IBM as a large account salesman I had to graduate from their notorious sales school before being let loose on real customers. This was back in days when computers came on semi trailers and needed water cooling.



Anyway I digress. What occurred to us during the phone conversation was that there is probably a real demand out there to teach alpaca breeders how to sell. Now as I type this I can already hear some toes curling at the thought of doing some "selling" or even "cold calling" an AOBA lead to see if they want to visit your farm. Its so much easier to send 3,000 emails than make onereal phone call.

But I really believe that sales skills are one of the critical success factors that separates successful alpaca breeders from ordinary alpaca breeders.

Let me know what you think adrian @mulberryalpacas.com

And remember enjoy today because one day this will be the good old days!

Adrian Stewart

I have said before that the Internet and digital cameras make selling alpacas so much easier.
If you have a web site and a digital camera the suddenly your market is much bigger than all those folks within an hours drive of where you live.

We have had a flurry of enquiries recently about some of our alpacas, none of them from what you might call local breeders but all are well informed buyers and asked just the right questions before deciding to come visit and inspect the alpacas themselves.

The two essential pictures are the front end (bite) and the back end (testicles or vulva depending on sex). Then if there are any little quirks now is a good time to mention them not when the buyer arrives and his or her expectations are sky high.







If you are in this alpaca breeding business for the long haul then being open and honest about your alpaca pays. You will over time build up an excellent reputation for having those values and be rewarded many times over. Reputations are slow to build but fragile and can be destroyed in a day, so please take good care of yours.

Adrian Stewart

A whole new event on this years alpaca calendar is the AFCNA (Alpaca Fibre Cooperative of North America) Fleece Show..which is scheduled for August 5th to 6th in Las Vegas.

Check out the web site by clicking here.

As I say its a new event but it looks like it will be very popular to me. There are a selection of seminars to attend and each entrant will receive verbal comments on their alpaca fleece which is a very welcome addition.

Meanwhile back at the ranch we decided to separate the two little boys Mr Bo Jangles and Mr Tambourine Man from their mothers and start the weaning process. Its always best if you can do this so they don't have any sight or sound from each other. But on small farms this isn't always possible so while we can separate them by quite a distance the layout of the farm means that they can still call to each other.



Adrian Stewart

Had a very welcome call and visit today from a local organic farm to ask if they could have my alpaca poo. Obviously I was delighted because even with a herd of only 25 alpacas the stuff builds up at an alarming rate.

I was even more impressed when they arrived not with some small bumper pull trailer as normally happens but a huge dump truck. Which I promptly filled to the brim with gorgeous alpaca manure.

The farm is a new venture and they were a young couple who were setting out to grow organic garlic and peppers. So in return for my manure they have agreed to deliver some organic vegetables which sounds like an excellent trade to me.

Being the kind of person I am I did however put them in contact with two other alpaca farms which are much nearer to where they live than we are...the two other farms are both members of SOJAA so it keeps it in the family so to speak.

Adrian Stewart

Following on from my story some weeks back about sheep racing and wondering if there was ever likely to be any alpaca racing I just had to share this story with you.

I was doing some internet research on the alpaca market in Australia and discovered Rory Mathews. Rugby-mad youngster, Rory Matthews likes to train every day. Unfortunately, he lives on an alpaca farm in Australia and does not have anyone his own age to play with.

But he's not worried - because he's got Chicky the alpaca. Chicky, a fellow resident at the Children's Animal Farm near Melbourne, has proved a formidable sparring partner for eight-year-old Rory.

So here is is with Chicky:










Not quite sure what Marty McGee of Camelid Dynamics fame would make of this...I must ask her sometime....

Adrian Stewart

Twins are pretty rare in alpacas and on the island of Tasmania (near Australia) the first pair arrived last month. It is believed there have been fewer than 10 pairs of twins successfully born in Australia in the past 20 years.

The Tassie twins are now about a month old and were born on a small property at Birches Bay near Woodbridge, south of Hobart.

"They don't look alike at all," says alpaca farm owner Pearl Anderson. "One's dark brown and the other is far lighter." Also, Bell is a girl, while Beau is a boy.

The number of alpacas has exploded in Australia recently.

Ten years ago there were about 10,000 nationwide.

Now there are 50,000, and that is expected to increase to 110,000 by 2008.

So when it comes to thinking about the future of American Alpacas in the international marketplace have no doubt that Australia will be out there.

If you want to know more check out the Australian Alpaca Association.

Adrian Stewart