Great news!

I'm on Twitter (@ElizabethWoodky) and I follow (and am followed by) some alpaca farms. On Friday, one of my Twitter friends attending the AOBA National Conference in Ohio made the following tweet:

"ARI will be offering BVD testing by Geneseek. They will test from the bloodcard."

Although I did a quick (very brief) internet search for more info on Friday, I have not heard an official announcement from ARI (Alpaca Registry Inc.). I'm very excited about this because the BVD testing is an extra expense and trip to the vet for us with our crias.

I'll post a link if I hear more info on this topic. This will be great if we can have BVDV testing done at the same time we are registering our crias with ARI!!

On another topic, Rene' just purchased a microscope and fecal testing kit so we can start doing our own fecal tests on the farm! Way cool! First we'll have to read directions (ugh! how boring!) and then we'll figure out how to do the testing...I'll keep you posted on our new educational experience!

Luxor's Lucas is officially registered!

Hooray! As of Thursday, February 26th, our little Lucas' registration was finally complete! And his sire and dam are exactly who I said they are! According to the Alpaca Registry, we should receive his certificate in the mail in the next week or so. Thank goodness!

If you happen to be attending the Great Midwest Alpaca Festival in Madison, WI, at the end of April, please stop by our stalls to say hello and see Luxor's Lucas, HPF Leroy, Nuno and Frances Bean. I'm excited to attend because we haven't been to a show in quite some time due to scheduling conflicts and bad timing. Those shows really fill up fast nowadays!

I had a pretty good following of readers on this blog and I'm sure I've lost many of them after the New Year with my irregular blogging schedule. I'm hoping to win some of you back though. I should be able to blog more regularly now because I'm one of the latest victims of corporate downsizing. The unstable economy has taken it's toll on the company I worked for so they were no longer able to keep me and many other employees. So while I'm searching for work, I'm able to spend more time with our alpacas. I might even be able to do a better job of marketing them now...who knows?

Registering the crias

I registered the crias online tonight with the alpaca registry. It's really easy to do although the registration isn't complete until all of the labwork is received and the crias parents are confirmed. Basically all of the "paperwork" and payment is done online so it's nice to get that taken care of quickly.

The Alpaca Registry, Inc. (ARI) requires DNA testing for all registrations. This is done by obtaining a blood sample from each alpaca you are registering and putting it on a card. You can see on the top left corner of this photo the big red blood spot in the middle of the circle.

We're getting better at this every year. I don't like having to do this to our poor little crias but it only takes a few minutes. We use a syringe to prick a spot on the ear to get our blood sample, then we suck up a little in the syringe and carefully squirt it onto the dna card. (I face the "open end" of the needle down toward the paper so it doesn't splash outside the circle.)

Although I'm sure it's uncomfortable to the crias, they really don't act like it was a big deal after we've finished. We make sure to put some pressure on the ear where we took the sample if it bleeds a lot. It stops bleeding rather quickly after that. Other farms may use a different technique or draw blood from the tail or different location. We've gotten comfortable with this method.

You'll also notice above the ARI natural fiber color chart. I clipped a small lock of hair off each alpaca and we matched up their fiber color with the color chart. You can order these directly from the ARI website for about $20 - it really is an important item to have because some of the colors are so close you really can't judge it for yourself that easily.

As a matter of fact, Leroy's fiber was a little tricky because we wavered a little between medium fawn and dark fawn. Depending on how the light hit it, the fiber "kind of" matched both colors. In the end, we decided on the dark fawn.

Now I just have to mail in our dna cards to ARI for processing and wait...