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You’re Not Getting an Emu! By Amy Grant Uncle Henry’s, the weekly swap or sell it guide, can sometimes be a curse. Like the Thursday afternoon when Jim determinedly walked into the kitchen Uncle Henry’s in hand, grabbed the phone and started dialing. “Someone has emus in ‘free for the taking’, he said.” Fortunately for all of us the emu people were not home. That was the day that Good Karma Farm was born. We’ve always had pets like dogs and cats and guinea pigs. In 2003 we had worked our way up to a horse named Dudley. It wasn’t long after we brought Dudley home that, while we really didn’t enjoy him, we did like the daily rhythm that taking care of a farm animal requires. Once we decided that emus weren’t in our future Jim mentioned that he had always liked looking at the alpacas at the Common Ground Fair. I think we visited a total of five farms before we made the decision to purchase three bred females with a gelding companion on the side. Here’s where the good karma came into play. Our first five births were all females! So from our little herd of four alpacas and a trusty guard llama named Roger, we’ve grown to 18 alpacas and added another guard llama named Dolly. 
A llama farmer advised us early on to learn as much about fiber as we could because ultimately
that is what we are raising. We took that advice to heart and now all of us either knit, spin,
needle felt, wet felt, dye and so on. When we started the farm, Jim owned and operated a
successful screen-printing and embroidery business but we found ourselves wanting to spend
more and more time working with the animals and the fiber. So in July of 2007 Jim sold his
business of 17 years and we started our own fiber processing operation, Good Karma Spinning
Co., where we spin other farm’s fiber as well as our own. Along with the spinning company
and the farm, we also own a soap company. So we are really on the fair and show circuit now,
promoting our farm, fiber processing and soap.Maybe the biggest beneficiary of this lifestyle is our 12-year-old daughter, Zoe. She has had first-hand lessons about the circle of life and the birds and the bees! Halter training the crias is her department and she takes to it naturally. She has a circle of friends from all over the country that she loves to see at the alpaca shows. She recently said that she has made more friends in the last four years with alpacas then she made in all the years before. Our goal when we began Good Karma Farm was to eventually have 10 breeding females. We are expecting seven crias next year so we are nearly there. Even when things are difficult (like 40 below zero and 3 feet of snow!) none of us have second-guessed our decision to start down this alpaca road. Sitting out in the field with our animals, enjoying that first warm day in the spring easily makes-up for the cold in the winter. Everyday brings us some new adventure. |
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