Alpaca Heritage Sale

If you’ve been in the alpaca business several years, finding a shearer and figuring out how to manage your relationship with him / her may not be a problem.  But there are many new breeders who may not have a good shearing plan in place yet. Now is the time to solve this problem.  Don’t wait for spring!

Some things that newer owners may need to know:

There are not enough shearers who will take on small jobs, especially 10 or less alpacas, and some owners may be unable to get a shearer this spring.  For 5 years, we sheared for many other alpaca farms, and we averaged 7 or 8 phone calls from desperate alpaca owners each spring, begging us to come and shear their alpacas.

Some of these alpaca owners had been told that they were on the schedule of a traveling shearer, only to find out that they were suddenly dumped off this schedule, because the person did not finish a previous job in time, had equipment trouble etc.

We held a free shearer-training day each spring for 5 years, on our farm, in hopes of increasing the pool of knowledgeable alpaca shearers.  Since my husband Tom’s illness from Sarcoidosis, we are unable to continue this program, but one big reason that we made our alpaca care DVD was so that we could still “train” new alpaca shearers through the detailed shearing instruction provided in the movie.

The majority of Tom’s customers contracted for his shearing services 1 year in advance.  New owners would often call us in June or even July and many of them complained that no shearer would even return their call.  They were unaware that most shearers work in April or May only.  Some owners had been told not to shear their pregnant females, which is why they thought they could hire a shearer during the summer months.

Here is something else to think about.  The majority of alpaca owners make shearing plans without a contract.  A contract would save both parties a lot of trouble if it specified things like:

1. What happens if the shearer does not show up or does not finish on the agreed upon date?
   
2. Who has what responsibility?  Many times the alpaca owner thinks that it is the job of the shearer to “wrangle” the alpacas out of the field and onto the shearing table or ground.  It should come as no surprise that the shearers often think just the opposite.  Often clients think that, if they are unable to keep their alpacas dry, the shearer should just reschedule them.  Again, shearers often disagree.  If they are good shearers, they may not have any openings left in their schedules.
   
   Another source of confusion is whose job it is to separate and bag up the various parts of the fleece.  I have lost count of the amount of times that I have been running a fleece show and had a new owner hand me a bag of mixed, blanket, 2nds and 3rds and tell me that it is “the fleece.”   A few times I have even had new owners enter a “show fleece” that does not contain the blanket portion of the fleece at all.  The owner should take responsibility for this task.
3. What bio-security precautions should be taken by the farm and the shearer to minimize the chance that an infectious disease will be passed, to or from this alpaca farm, to or from another alpaca farm?
4. What else is or is not included?  Many clients also want their alpaca’s toenails or teeth trimmed “while we have them on the table.”  They sometimes ask to have the worming shots given or blood drawn then as well.  Extra services and their price should be spelled out ahead of time.

If you want to produce show fleeces, you should plan to have those alpacas’ fleeces cleaned before they are shorn, which means that you will have to have enough helpers on hand to have one person cleaning animals while another person from your farm leads alpacas to the table and helps to calm them during the shearing.  Our cleaning routine included wanding with the Kwik ‘n Slick ©, blowing out with an industrial blower and hand picking out debris. We had 4 to 8 people working on our shearing days.

Don’t rule out doing your own shearing!  This is the only way to get exactly the shearing that you want, and it is a great side business for smaller alpaca farms.  If you haven’t already done it, make your shearing plan now!