Posts Tagged ‘alpaca farm’

Yesterday was our monthly herd health day. All our alpacas – except the youngest crias – received their deworming injections. The advantage to this monthly routine is that it forces us to put our hands on every alpaca every month. We can check body conditions and keep our eyes open for other potential health issues.

The weather is brisk this morning – it feels like fall is on its way!

We’re having a stretch of very hot and humid weather that’s a bit unusual for us.  Thank goodness! Neither Ron nor I like this weather. And the alpacas don’t like it much, either.

We spend a lot of time trying to keep the alpacas cool in this weather.  Of course, they have access to the barn and we have overhangs on most sides that provide additional shade.  We set up fans in the barns to help circulate the air and provide some cooling. Water buckets are filled over and over with cool water.

All our pastures have a sprinkler or two.  We use the round brass rings. These work well as the alpacas like to lay down on the sprinklers and there are no moving parts or sharp edges. We set them to spray up just a couple feet above the ground. This lets the alpacas cool off their legs and bellies. We rotate sprinklers all day, just leaving them on for 15 or so minutes at a time in each pasture.  The alpacas cool themselves off and go back to grazing or to the barn.

Spring is a very busy time on the farm for many reasons, but mainly because Ron is busy shearing at other farms every day. Now that shearing is winding down, we are starting to catch up on all we let slide for the last few months…like posting to our blog. I’ll do better from now on!

We’ve had 8 crias born on the farm so far this year and lots more to go.  I’ll post some updated cria photos soon – promise!

Our first day of shearing and we have a barn full of shivering alpacas!  Here’s the view out our front door this evening….

…is not starting out very well!  We have a winter storm warning through tomorrow afternoon. Rain changing to snow and 2 to 6 predicted for tonight.  Alpacas are in the barn where we hope they will stay dry, but know they will not stay warm.   We’ll be shearing for the next 3 days.  Let’s hope this cold spell passes through quickly!

It’s another beautiful day in the Kingdom!  Cold nights and warm sunny days are perfect for sugaring, skiing and drying up muddy roads.   The ‘pacas are happily eating hay out in the sun and we are starting to eliminate hay bedding and, hopefully, getting their fleeces cleaned up a bit before shows and shearing.

It’s about time!  It’s been such a wet, gray summer. But the last few days have been lovely, if a bit cool. Today is starting out sunny and dry – a perfect summer day.

It’s been a busy week here. We sheared some of the crias, weighed and body scored all the alpacas, trimmed the boys’ toenails and moved the chicks out of the brooder and into the coop.  Next week we’ll finish up shearing crias, trim more toenails and trim some teeth.  Hopefully, Star will have her cria next week. She’s at day 338 today, but she went over a year last year.  We’ll see…not much we can do to rush the process.

Our pastures are still partly snow-covered and pretty wet.  Normally, we would let the pastures dry out fairly well before putting the alpacas out on a regular basis.  But today was such a beautiful day, that I let the girls out into their pastures for a few hours.  They loved it and the younger ones were running and pronking.  Rain is forecast for tomorrow, so they won’t see the big pastures again for a while.

Wet and snowy spring pastures