Well everyone is involved in the hay analysis debate now. The grower, his field agent, the lab, the local vet, the big name vets at Oregon State and Ohio State, all the farms who have the hay and our own local nitartes guru Irene Fuller.... After much debate about units and measures the bottom line is that no one really knows for sure what the situation is with camelids and nitrates!

So at one extreme Irene Fuller would say anything over 500 ppm NO3 is putting your animals at risk and David Andersen at Ohio state would simply get one of his grad students to cut and paste some dairy cattle info from the interenet into an e-mail...I must remember not to send the Camelid Institute at Ohio any more money they really are appalling when it comes to supporting breeders, in my limited experience.
Hats off to Norm Evans and Chris Cebra from OSU both of whom replied within the day.

There is plenty of information on the web if you want to read this up the only site dedicated to Camelids and nitrates is Feed Safe which is run by Irene www.feedsafe.com

I will write a piece to go in the Library later this month. There won't be any guidelines but as always I will share what I know.

The good news is that the sun came out today and the alpacas ate fresh grass in the pastures and sun bathed, such a change from yesterday. The farmers market was open as usual but is winding down now and next week will be the last week until March.

Had a call from a spinner looking for black alpaca wool.....let me know if you have some available...

Took some great pictures which I will upload to the web sometime soon - maybe even tomorrow...

Getting some very good feedback from people who have read the BLOG and enjoyed it which is great!

By Adrian Stewart