I had a very nice letter from Mandy Wilson an alpaca breeder in the UK today asking where she can buy tags to go round the necks of her alpacas, apparently she had seen them in Alpaca Magazine being worn by alpacas at shows and at auctions but couldn't get anyone to tell her where they were from.....basically none of the US breeders even replied to her e-mail requests.....which is truly dumb. I guess the breeders she asked didn't realise that last year she flew over for Greg Mecklam's Parade of Champions Auction and bought Caligulas Accoyo Galaxy for $185,000.

Never make an assumption that just because someone lives outside the USA that they are not a potential customer.

Moving on ....I spent sometime last year talking to the company that publish the Dummies guides and trying to get them interested in producing a Dummies guide to alpacas...but without success they simple thought the global market was too small. Well the good news is that during that process I was introduced to a literary agent in New York who called to say that another publisher may be interested in producing an alpaca book for beginners. Not sure what will come of it, but it was very exciting to get the call as I had given the idea up as a lost cause.

Meanwhile the weather here remains in the 90's and we are running irrigation all day and just rotating around the alpaca pastures.

It really is a complex balancing act to work out which pastures to water, which to graze, which to rest, which to mow and which to fertilize or spray for weeds. Speaking of which its almost time to gove move the irrigation and clean the filters out.

Adrian Stewart