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Farm In The Meadow By Craig Wanggaard In the mid-nineties, Craig showed Jan an article from an airline magazine about raising alpacas as a business. Jan dismissed the idea as a crazy one for a senior business manager and an academic reference librarian even to consider! Then in October 2002, as we enjoyed a fall weekend in Maine, Jan suggested visiting Andes Alpacas for an Open Farm Day. Craig quickly agreed it sounded like an interesting idea. We found it a life-changing experience! We joined AOBA, scheduled visits to farms, attended shows and seminars. We learned all we could and decided this would be a good second career. We had been looking for a place in Maine to live – now we were looking for land on which to build our farm! In May of 2003, we found property in Richmond and began the process of designing the energy-efficient house and farm we wanted. By late summer, we felt confident enough in our alpaca plans and bought two females, one pregnant, from Chase Tavern Farm. We also decided to co-own a young, promising herdsire with them. In September, we bought another female from Angel Wood Alpacas at the East-West Auction in New Jersey. We left all the animals at their respective farms. Building is a slow and sometimes frustrating process! It was not until December 2006 that we finally were able to move into our new house and bring eight of the animals plus two guard llamas, to the Farm in the Meadow. An acre of fenced pasture and two hoop houses provided winter shelter. Learning the routine of alpaca care in a Maine winter was not the most pleasant way to get acclimated. It involved carrying warm water from the house and braving the bitter winds that scour across our open meadow. Nevertheless, we survived, learning to walk on snowshoes in the process (much harder when an alpaca steps on the back of one and sends you sprawling!). We welcomed the spring of 2007 and experienced the arrival of four new crias – one of them a scary premature birth. A fifth was born in New Jersey, where we still boarded some animals. By September, those four girls joined us in Maine. We fenced in a lot more pasture and began to plan for a barn – a large canvas hoop structure with wooden sidewalls which was not completed until March of 2008. So we spent another challenging winter carrying water to the hoop houses in the original pasture. The animals love their new barn, as do we. It provides wonderful interior light and breezy ventilation. Now, since we also have installed automatic waterers, we almost look forward to next winter. Four more crias arrived in the summer of 2008. We've learned so much and discovered strengths and skills we didn't know we had. It may not be quite the "relaxed lifestyle of an alpaca farmer" we had heard about, but it definitely is worthwhile! |
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