I never would have predicted 30 years ago that I would be Phoebe’s dad. Phoebe turns 15 on February 16…I’m 65… I had the experience of  raising 3 wonderful sons, Phoebe was my first daughter, followed just 2 years later by her sister Honor.

Phoebe is special. She had typical developmental milestones in her pre-school years and what seemed to be a very painful shyness in pre-school increasingly became apparent as being much more by the fourth grade. She could not respond to her teacher in class. Her grades plummeted. Her teacher became less and less tolerant of Phoebe’s “tuning her out” and lack of participation, lack of comprehension, particularly math. Her teacher, having to control an oversized class, and having little time or patience to actually personally supervise Phoebe, never could figure out that Phoebe had a learning disorder that was very disabling, and remained quite convinced that there was a behavioral problem and rewarded her by having her repeat 4th grade…in her i.e., the same teacher’s,  class again.

Even worse, at least for, me was the fact that she could no longer speak to me, or make eye contact

Why?

Her mood became increasing grey. She was angry, morose and spent her time alone. There had been several episodes in the past where we had been called to school because Phoebe had a number of times when she had to seek solace in the nurses office till mom or dad could pick her up. Sometimes it was because she had been rude to the teacher, even going so far as to drop the f*bomb. She was anxious and fretful. She started missing a lot of school with assorted aches and pains.

Here’s what we found out what was wrong…

We knew that there was an organic problem. Phoebe’s older brother David, is a child psychologist and strongly recommended that she be tested. David opened his dad’s consciousness to possibilities like “selective mutism”, “childhood anxiety disorders”, “Asperger’s Syndrome” and “Autistic Spectral Disorder’s”

We did extensive and expensive testing. Phoebe tested in the 100th centile in reading and reading comprehension.  She was reading Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” at age 10.

Her math skills were at the very lowest centile. She had trouble with spatial configuration and couldn’t separate squares from rectangles or rhombi. She couldn’t tell emotion expressed in facial expression. The angry face and smiley face looked the same to her…and not just on the test page. She still can’t tie her shoes…or make change of a dollar.

Most importantly, she couldn’t look anyone in the eye and would begin to have severe anxiety if anyone looked at her, spoke to her or even talked about her…and she would know. Phoebe has hyperacusis and can hear things that only the very best CIA agent with the very best listening  devices, could hear only on their best days.

Our first attempt at therapy ran a year with a very, very uptight child behavior therapist who rewarded Phoebe’s inability to communicate with notions of how she would be rewarded for experiences such as meeting and introducing herself to a set number of people per week and then re-inforce her positive behavior with a gold star.  Good idea! We couldn’t get her to say hello to her father. We quit after she chastised our frozen. terrified daughter by sternly telling Phoebe to stay away from the cockatoo that she kept caged in her waiting room.

Still no diagnosis.

The next year was spent in “sandbox therapy”. For just over a year Phoebe would spend an hour a week in silent play in a sandbox, her patient father reading National Geographic in a waitimg room, while I suspect that her therapist was  almost certainly trying to establish that she might have been sexually abused by her gynecologist father. That at  least would offer one potential explanation for her mutism…She would no longer go…I obliged, but did get a referral for a child psychiatrist.

Enter Sigmund Freud…well not really, but a strict Freudian. Professor Emeritus, no less. He kept a picture of the great Dr Freud in his office. Don’t get me wrong. I have a terrific respect for psychiatry, and the contribution of Dr Freud. But I didn’t believe that Phoebe had a problem in her oral phase, specifically as a result of  ”not enough teat”. That might have worked in his original Beverly Hills adolescent practice of teenagers, most of whom had eating disorders, but we knew that we weren’t reading out of the same book, let alone off the same page.

“What about selective mutism, autistic spectral disorders, childhood anxiety disorders?”

It turns out that “our” Dr Freud did not believe much in organic brain problems in childhood psychiatric disorders. He was however, kind enough to offer a refferal to the M.I.N.D. Institute which does specialize in the investigation of autism.

After 5 years of searching we now had a diagnosis. We had an explanation for the anxiety that would paralyze Pheobe, and some medication to control it. We started home schooling and addressed some of the specific learning disabilities that the school system had neither the finances, resources, understanding or qualified personel to deal with. Her mom enthusiastically took it on…in a loving, caring and patient way…she even went back to recover the fractions in math that were “tuned out” five years earlier in the fourth grade…twice.

But there was still no treatment. That’s in large part because individuals with the autistic spectrum have many different disorders and any one of them doesn’t fit all the criteria. There is no treatment…there are only drugs that treat specific symptom complexes, and that in a disorder has many faces. There are many drugs, but not enough experience to identify specific faces that respond to their specific identity. There is no “one size fits all” therapy.

What has worked is the individual and loving attention of her family. Phoebe has always had a good relationship with her younger sister Honor who has an incredible understanding and empathy of Phoebe’s condition. She has also had an innate ability to connect with it. Honor has lived up to her name and take it upon herself to help her older sister make sense of developing a personna as a teenager…no small feat, even for a very mature and uniquely sensitive twelve year old.

Honor and Phoebe

Mom has learned to see the world through the eyes of terrified child, as only a mother could, and open those eyes to a world of possibility.

…and dad. He’s thankful for the patience that he has learned and the conviction that he had that Phoebe’s brilliance, has been masked by “demons”. The picture here:

Phoebe's art, age 9

 was done by Phoebe when she was 9 years old.

Our home schooling has paid off in spades. Phoebe still has trouble looking me in the eye but talks in short phrases without “growling” at me. I am now responsible for “independent study” and we are studying salmon migration now, which we’re going to follow up with a field trip to Nimbus Fish Hatchery. She has come with me on mushroom forays. We’re having wonderful converations on long drives…actually, I do most of the talking, and I make sure not to make eye contact…but she’s definitely listening, and that’s wonderful.

I’m as proud of Phoebe as any father could be. I have always been more impressed by what people have been able to overcome than who they are. My daughter is a giant.

Phoebe and mom @ Bodega Bay

Happy 15th birthday Phoebe. I love you.

The sunday breakfast picture…the family went whale watching the day before and then a mushroom foray on the Sonoma Coast. The delicious omelet was lovingly made by dad with the “black trumpet” chanterelles that we found at Salt Point State Park. I was the only one to taste it. It seems that when Alan Rockefeller attests to it being non poisonous, everybody is willing to offer that it is delicious in a polenta. There are some (three to be exact), who still are nervous about independently taking the risk of tasting the identical mushroom just one week later for no other reason than dad having identified it.

That poses no problem for me. Except that the last bite will always be available to Phoebe… when she is ready.

For more on autistic spectral disorders:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism_spectrum

For a fabulous and entertaining read:

Look Me In The Eye, My Life With Asperger’s:      John Elder Robison

Ken Rosenfeld

www.renaissanceridgealpacas.com

We try to avoid allowing a cria more than 7 months old to continue nursing…our moms, even if they aren’t pregnant, need a break by this point.
Breeding most of the year, as we do, we’re sure learning that especially when the wean period coincides with parasite egg ground hatch temperature,  we have to be extra cautious. For us that’s usually late november till sometime in april. That can be tough, if you’re away for more than at week at a time, 6-7 times each spring.

 Chris Cebra has convinced me that we all need to have E mac on our minds, since there are likely very few of us who haven’t had it in our herd. I am not Chris Cebra, nor did I take notes, so I apologize in advance if I’m misquoting him, but do encourage any breeder who hasn’t read his work or gone to his talk to see what their recipe for herd management is like after they have heard him and see if it changes. All that said…this is what we’re doing:

When weaning, wait a little longer when necessary. We have some that at 5 months, just seem to have forgotten which one their mom is. When you see them with their head in the feedbin, it’s almost as if they’re stuck and want to say “yeah mom’s upstairs watching TV”. Those are the ones that we wean at 6 months…especially if they spend the rest of their time “humping”, or trying to hump the other adult females, and not just when a breeding is going on. By three months of age, our cria are quite proficient at gaining entrance round the clock to their private creep feeder filled with free choice alpalfa, hay and water. This helps them to become strong and healthy, gain some independence and rely on themselves when mom is too busy. This helps enable most of our kiddos to be weaned at 6-7 months of age.

Everyone else gets weaned by 7 months, even if they’re pacing the fence for a couple of days. We try to give them extra alfalfa and pellets but still get them used to a halter pronto, even if it’s just to “wear” and we may not put a lead on for weeks. It’s just a chance to get them used to being handled. We both on occasion have been known to “hum” when we pass out alfalfa, so that most of them will recognize that we are the same 2 people that used to hum when we brought it to them in their creap feeders. At weaning, they begin to rely on and trust us more than ever. They do find comfort in us which helps prevent any additional “abandonment stress.”

We find that if mom is pregnant, even with a reasonable body score, she now needs her nutrition back for her next round. It must have been cruel “in nature” but these critters had to survive a harsh reality in the altiplano…survival of the fittest…”tough love”.

-we are now giving toltrazuril routinely by 3 months. If we see diarrhea prior to that, we don’t trust our fecal on what is invariably a poor fecal specimen (too little tapioca) so we treat with toltrazuril/Baycox for Emac.

-if we’re concerned that they are not eating voraciously upon weaning, particularly if they’re losing weight (we weigh them once a week until we feel like their “on a roll”), we treat with toltrazuril.

-we are nervous about taking a cria under 8 months to a show and make sure to do weekly weights and watch for signs of “disinterest” or “lethargy” as a reason for  doing a fecal when they come back, rather than to wait and see if there is diarrhea.  Sometimes they all end up getting rectals and fecals. Even if the fecal comes back negative, if they are failing to thrive or have low energy, low weight gain or weight loss, we treat for Emac because just because we can’t see it at that point in time does not mean it is not there (this, assuming that there are no other parisites to blame in the sample).

We don’t think that you have to “catch it” at a show. We think that the stress just gets that “still sensitive” immunity down.

So that’s what we’re doing. We do worry about “resistant strains” out of overuse of antimicrobials, but have to calculate it into a cost/benefit analysis.

We do lot of fecals, especially this time of year and occasionally turn up a nematode that we “independly” have to treat in a cria who we are concerned about, but until we get information to believe otherwise, consider a heavy coccidia or E mac load in any cria that is  not gaining and/or not “looking right”.  We do fecal floats with glucose, and when we take a wait and see approach try to repeat it a few times every few days, until we’re comfortable.

We also worry that a lot of the time that If we have a mom who many would refer to as  a “poor milker”.  I worry that maybe she has been “run down” by a vigorous cria who is weighing in at 52 pounds at 4 months, might need weights every few days and fecals if losing. There’s often nothing wrong with [i]her milk[/i] in fact it’s great, but her little boy would be using a glass if possible.

We have only one scale, so all the nursing moms stay near the main barn from at least 315 days till babies are weaned. Body scoring is something that we do at the very least.

We try to walk the pastures 2-3 times a day and “check them out”…we can’t tell you what it is we’re checking for…but we know it when we see it!

We’ve been at it onnly eight years. We’re not  sure what others are doing, or what individual vets in various parts of the country recommend, but do believe that in our herd, a strategy that agressively suspects E Mac, a ubiquitous organism with a very high [i]cost[/i], is warranted.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a vaccine?…It’s sometimes really tough to know what’s going on under all that fleece.

Usual disclaimer…I’m not a vet and I welcome healthy discussion and other recomendations.

That’s all the news “from only ten acres”

Ken
Kenneth M Rosenfeld MD
Renaissance Ridge Alpacas
http://www.renaissanceridgealpas.com

Small businesses are hurting. We’re personally lucky enough to enjoy good health, meet our expenses, especially by realistically looking at how to look at our bottom line. But these are still hard times when you’re growing by leaps and bounds, and love the  ”roll of the dice” that comes from every breeding decision. Don’t get me wrong…I’m not suggesting that breeding is all risk…there is a lot that we can predict.

 Just as there is for any start-up business in an emerging industry , especially in the worst economy in 80 years!

There has been a very major change that has taken place since the first “wave” of interest in alpacas of the first 25 year or so stage. That “wave” became more like a “tsunami” when it met up with the biggest financial crisis in my short 65 years…and who saw it coming.
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From my vantage point after just 8 years I have a few observations:
…there have been major improvements in phenotype and fleece quality of the animals that I’m  seeing at shows…in some classes, particularly at the larger shows, there is little to chose between 1st to 6th in the showring…and quite honestly…number 3 is the one that might best fit my program. That should not be taken to mean that we are breeding to be number 3. But let’s put the showring in perspective.

We want all the ribbons that we can get…but that isn’t how we have grown to make our breeding decisions:
….a mother who makes 3 champions trumps a 14 month old champion, even if she wasn’t a champion herself…but that’s especially true if her histograms and skin biopsy further support her breeding value, and do it beyond the brief interval of a show career
…sometimes you’ve got to “trust the lines”…the ribbons that aren’t blue or red are sometimes because the juvie or even yearling, both still actively growing “kids” might have been “stressed” by a difficult trip, a low grade parasite load, weaning, weight loss etc…that 3rd or lower place ribbon might be a result of that animal just not having shown well.

…sometimes the pedigree means little…

..and there’s a whole lot more that  we all have to learn, the veterinary community included, especially with regard to  herd health…we need to continue to work to understand how best to manage, and breed for vigor, parasite resistance and get a better understanding of the diseases and their management in this species…sure livestock can become dead stock, but I think that there is room to grow in clinical diagnosis, based on the correlations that I have seen on necropsy reports…I say that not to denigrate the hard work of some very dedicated veterinarians (Chris Cebra immediately comes to mind), but I do believe that we are at a time, just 25 years into this industry where it might still be a good idea that we still have more questions, than we do answers

A propos my last blog on small farm diversity, sustainablity and life style, Julie and I individually made what we think might be “momentous” progress. She stayed home, and got to resume her designs on our “startup” fiber studio. She cut out the windows and ordered windows and sliding doors. She’s come up with a relatively inexpensive idea of what the minimal equipment we need to have will be and has acquired some of it.

But I got to go to the SOMA mushroom foray in Occidental, in Sonoma County.
Julie’s folks gave us a gift of a weekend at Sea Ranch 15 years ago and I remember so well how magnificent Bodega Bay was and loved Occidental, both of them along the way on our trip up the coast as we left Julie’s folks home in Marin County. It was around the same time that I was first starting to dream about “retirement” and we were making occasional trips from Boston where I still had a busy ob-gyn practise. After looking at the prices in Bodega Bay, I started wondering if Occidental might be a better alternative…what a gorgeous little town.
Julie, having grown up mostly in Marin County next door, had been a frequent visitor
though. We passed an area along the Russian River crowded with, what I would guess, were at least a dozen tents. She looked over to me in the driver’s seat and said…”yeah, but it’s all 60s hippies”. Imagine that !

 My 1967-model wife, born in the Haight Ashbury, having “danced in Golden Gate Park with a flower in her hair”, telling her 1946-vintage (it was a very good year) new husband that “they’re hippies”. Now back in the day, I did crop my hair to just over my ears, but I had a “stache” and side burns, and was known to occasionally inhale. I was more of an observer, growing up as I did, in Canada, and having to work through med school in the late 60s…but I wonder if she knew that inside my head I was wondering if she thought, that I thought, that being a ’60s hippie was a bad thing….hmmm.

But I digress…

Here’s what I learned at the foray:

First off, if you like meeting alpaca breeder’s, you’ll love meeting mushroomers. I went with the intent of identying as many new mushrooms of the 4000 or so that grow in our area as was possible, a daunting task, given the relatively porous memory of an “over 60″ who is not quite sure of what he had for lunch.

Unfortuately, in this part of the country, it hasn’t rained in months, so most of what we found was dried up and and left from the fall mushroom “blushes”. We were reassured that this would be a good thing, because if we identify them in the state they were in, it would be a “piece of cake” to identify the real thing. Sounds resonable enough. 

I can’t complaint…our small foursome proudly brought some of the best mushrooms on the identification table, not to mention some of the few gorgeous chanterelles that mage it this year (we’re having risotto tonight).

I got to meet Ken Litchfield, a very entertaining educator/mountain man who lectures on mushroom cultivation at Merritt College in Oakland. In a couple of short hours, I learned the ABCs of collecting spore from wild edibles, preparing your own agar from potatoes for inoculation , building your own substrate for spawn from straw, wood shavings or even various grains or coffee grounds, how to start your own “spawn” and then propagate your “mother spawn”.

I learned that there are many challenges in that wild mushroom cultivation, which is still relatively new, but there are many successful models in this new business. Much like alpacas, it has the potential to be carried on even at a small scale. There is a large market for exotics, both fresh and dried. He suggested to me that it is highly probable that I could work at trying combinations of the bedding/poop piles that we use (you don’t want it completely composted) and eventually establish some variety. He even recommended a “portabello” type mushroom, available on the internet, in spawn, that is not in the same family as the supermarket portabello, i.e it is not in the common agaricus, domesticated variety. It is very prolific, larger than the agaricus (domesticated) type, both in the button stage and in the umbrella/ portabella stage too. I wouldn’t have to grow it in “doubles”, the huts that are used, and trays, but just plunk it in the poop/shaving covered ground in our oak wooded area, not being grazed…( As an aside, the site that sells this spawn, shows a young lady holding a pileus (the cap) the size of a medium pizza. They suggest covering it with teriyaki sauce and grilling it. That sucker would feed a family of 4)…I might have to experiment with tarps to protect from the heat and dry wind and maybe some type of misting for humidity, but it just might be doable…and for very little up front investment. He thought that there was a reasonable likelihood that in our California climate, I might be able to grow it with repeated flushes through most of the year. Whether the spawn would need replenishing after a couple of years would need to be determined, but that is not an insurmountable issue. 

So…just maybe, it might be a very good complimentary activity for the small or even large alpaca farmer. Talk about making chicken salad out of chicken sh*t!

Can it turn a profit? I don’t know, but it will cost me next to nothing to find out.

I did tell him that my agenda was to prove that I could make a model for a working alpaca farm, that is sustainable, with diverse income sources, that would provide a comfortable retirement revenue for baby boomers like myself. I will admit that he then responded that it was very possible, but that there would probably be a lot more money in it if I wrote the book and got a book deal…

Andrew Weil was the first speaker after a wonderful first night dinner which included a magnificent wild mushroom soup,  and 3 tables each loaded with at least eight samples of local artisan cheeses, in samples at least 5 pounds each with more than enough bread, beer and wine to accompany them, so as to keep the enthusiastic conversations of ardent mycophiles abuzz for several congenial hours. Weil, who many may know from his books and PBS television appearances, is a longtime and very knowledgeable mycologist and his talk on health maintenance, disease treatment and nutritional balance were an complete revelation to me. He has studied Chinese medicine extensively, and I wasn’t aware of the body of data to support health benefits and particularly the nutrient value of this high protein, low fat, low carb. vit B rich food that had many other elements and compounds essential to good health.

We were then entertained by Eugenia Bone, whose book I mentioned in my last blog. If anyone wants a good read…have a look at “Mycophilia”, her 4th book..

I unexpectedly found myself with extra time on sunday morning, before my next foray and dropped in on a class given by Tina Wistrom and Dorothy Beebee on mushroom dying. I knew very little about dyeing, but came to find out that Dorothy Beebee is a foremost authority on mushroom dyes and papermaking, with over thirty years of experience. I managed to prepare 15 specimens of dyed yarn, out of 5 wild mushrooms, with each of these yarns prepped with diiferent mordants…I could really get into that. Even better…2 of those 5 mushrooms grow on our property;

…Omphalotis olivascens (the common Jack o’ Lantern mushroom)…we’ve got it along our driveway…it dyes beautifully…Pisolithus tinctorius is that monster puff ball I have several pictures of in my post “mushroom soup”. You’ll recognize it as the one that is destroying our driveway as it pokes through the asphalt. I’ve illustrated it in several phases of development . It makes a wonderful dye. When you boil it up, however, you get to know why it is commonly known as “dead man’s foot”.

So. I have a lot to work with. I’m told that there are 10,000 boomers retiring every day,. (I saw that on a car insurance commercial…I think).  Those, who like me, are too restless to be satisfied without a source of work, challenge or retirement income have good reasons to be enthusiastic about the future challenges to alpaca breeders, with many outlets of activity providing viable business models…

We’ve learned a lot over the last 8 years.

Looking back, I can’t help but wonder how we might have done in comparison had we planted grapes on our small acreage instead of raising alpacas.  I like to make that comparison. At one point I entertained the idea of planting grapes on our small acreage. I am quite certain that given our finances, that would have been a bad idea…

Some of the best wine in the world is made in people’s garages. I bought a case of a  Ribeira del Duero wine 20 years ago on a visit to Spain. This fellow was in his 70s and his family had been making his “limited” edition for 6 generations. He crushed the grapes wearing  his boots in a huge tub in his garage.

Small versus big. Changing show rules so that everyone gets a ribbon, Complaining about the shows and costs, when you’re not even prepared to put some of your own time and effort into working to improve the system.  I think that it is important to implement changes that are necessary, but only if they result in improvement. Can someone explain to me why the new show cottage fleece classes don’t believe that weight is important?

But, at the end of the day, it probably is more important for each of us to try to define our own business plans, and evaluate if they are working.  There is a lot of room to define that path through smart and ongoing analysis and evaluation and a bit of homest introspection. I don’t pretend to have the answer, but I think that there is also plenty of room to contribute to our individual successes and the success of the industry.

 I’m convinced that there will be a market for alpaca as a luxury fiber, and a place for many levels of successful participation for the breeding of stock, and production of quality fiber and products. But when you we get down to the real poop, each of us is better served by collaboration, than we are by dissing the organization and volunteers who are trying to move it forward…especially in this time. And that likewise, each of us has to take ownership of our individual business decisions and for it’s success or failure over the next few years.  I suspect it will be  less highlight by what we are doing wrong, but what we might, individually and collectively, be doing right, to assure everyone’s success in his or her individual “niche”. This is one rising tide that I believe has the potential to float many boats, of many different construction and design.

This last weekend has me feeling a lot more enthusiastic. Stand back and watch what we “old fart” baby boomers are going to do. Oh, and to my dear wife…I am more than proud to have lived through the ’60s. There is a whole lot that might be worth revisiting.

Another great week on our 10 acres. LOve and peace…

For some time I have been wondering where we fit, in the big scheme of things, with our ever evolving “strategic” planning, in our “mom and pop” business.

I would go so far as to say that we are “cottage industry” breeders, despite some posts that I have made on various fora(ums), against a separate association or show system.

 It doesn’t make much sense to me to try to define what a “cottage business” involving alpacas ought to look like. There are none of us who can say where each of us has come from, is coming from (needs) or wants to go. All each of us has in common is that we are mostly dreamers. There is absolutely nothing constructive, as I see it, to pigeon-holing a business model in an emerging industry that is still defining itself, and whose success will ultimately have to be measured by the interdependency of all ranchers and the potential success of all comers.

There is absolutely no question that “the huggable investment” was a great start to introduce the US to alpacas…it worked for me. It’s how alpacas first came to my attention. It was a terrific phase one. I know that a lot of people are feeling very uncertain in these difficult economic times. I don’t allow myself to fall into that mode.

So where does our dream see us in 5 years and what is our plan? Well, hopefully, the world economy will have turned around. And more importantly, we will all realize that the alpaca industry was depressed no more than most other sectors, and that the angst that many of us felt was not a denunciation of the alpaca industry per se but part of the negativity most of us feel even when there are signs of recovery. After all…most of us are no better at seeing when we’ve peaked than when we’ve troughed…isn’t that what the “housing bubble” was all about?

More importantly, we have only 10 acres to dream on, 35 hours of parttime help a week, and a very limited budget. Moreover, we know that consumer confidence, new business investments, and small business in particular is going to take a good part of those 5 years to recover. Now that’s scary!

We (I) do my(our) best not to be valedictorian in the “school of handwringing”. It takes a lot of discipline and practice, but I do have to admit that for me it has taken a very long time to understand that you can only change the things that you are able to change, and put other distractions aside.

We have defined breeding objectives. We’re continuing to breed all our foundation females. To do otherwise would be to stop our production line. First and foremost we want to be breeders, even if it a realtively small herd. To do otherwise you’d have to stifle a dream.

Secondly we want to go to some shows every show season. We want to see what the other breeders are doing, at any size, and see how we measure up. More importantly we want to disprove the notion that you have to be a big breeder to produce quality stock. To me that makes as much sense as saying that a microbrewery can’t make a great beer, a “boutique” winery can’t make a great wine or a small restaurant can’t make great food. We love the travel, time we spend together, competition and camradery and don’t take vacations. Not to do the shows would stifle a dream.

We want to use every square foot of what we own and every bit of our imagination to create a sustainable farm and try to put some part of future earnings back into the business:

We halted construction on a small “guest cottage” that Julie started a few years ago. Julie has had very good success with demand side for rovings and finished fiber, but we’ve had to pay for processing. We need to find out how much of that process we can reasonably do ourselves to cut our costs and improve our bottom line. Julie has been hard at work at that and it looks like we will configure our 400 square foot space into a fiber studio in which we will have to squeeze the adventurous guest. It’s time to visit that dream.

We’ve got our hillbilly “tumbler”, and Julie washes the fiber by hand. So all we need is a picker and carder and how do we find one that does what we want at the price we can deal with? The fiber dream only begins there…

I recently became interested in mushrooms. My sister, Arlene, sent me Eugenia Bone’s “Mycophilia” and Gary Lincoff’s “National Audubon Society…Field Guide to Mushrooms”. It turns out that there is a terrific demand for mushrooms world wide, and Europe and the Far East in particular, where crops have been in major decline, but the demand is still great, and not just for fresh but dried mushrooms, some of which actually taste better than when fresh. There are terrific nutritive benefits and many of the wild cultivated types need incompletely composted hay and manure to feed off, and even send beneficial organisms into the soil for vegetables (mushrooms aren’t vegetables…they’re fungi, a Kingdom more like animals than plants, and make up 1/5 of the worlds biomass i.e. more than  either animals or plants…but I digress).

We specialize in  poop and hay. In fact, we turned our pile yesterday and brought many shovel loads down to a small oak forested area that we have.

Julie’s mom send me a Fungi Perfecti shiitake mushroom kit for Christmas/Hanukkah and as I write this there is now the first bloom (a mushroom is actually a “fruit” of a very complex mycelial system that needs to be encoraged to “bloom”). There are 2 gorgeous shiitakes, but a whole lot more emerging out of a basketball sized mass of  “spored”, mycelialized, sterilized straw on our kitchen counter, and there are supposed to be 3-4 “flushes” before it depletes it’s substrate.

This weekend I’m going to a “Foray” in Sonoma County put on by The Sonoma County Mycologic Association. It will be fun learning to identify edibles, but there will be mutiple speakers and cultivation of wild mushrooms is one of the topics, with a very good speaker, I’m told. And some great sessions on natural mushroom dyeing and cooking demonstrations where at the end of the weekend we get to taste what we found on our forays.

There has to be something in there for an alpaca breeder. My research so far has shown that one of the greatest costs for a small mushroom business is the compost. It appears that it is time intensive and there are still crop risks and still a lot to be learned…I’m used to that.

It has got to be worth investigating.  I don’t expect to become a tartuffati, even though truffles have been cultivated and sell for $3K a pound. (as an aside…Eugenia Bone’s relates that ” the largest …(truffle)… found was 3.3 pounds and sold at a charity auction 2007 for $300,000 to a casino owner in Macau after a bidding war with the controversial English artist Damien Hirst. (That truffle subsequently spoiled. Undaunted, the same tycoon matched that price in 2010, when he bought 2 white truffles totaling 2.8 pounds.)”

Those are all the dreams that we have on the table… at the moment. Stay tuned. Oh, and we accept advise, ideas and suggestions from anyone headed in the same direction.

Ken

www.renaissanceridgealpacas.com

You think 10 acres is nothing to boast about?

Puuuhlease! I’m proud to say the I grew up on Esplanade Ave in Montreal. That’s one block over from Mordechai Richler’s St. Urban Street, as in “St Urban Street Horseman”. We lived in the same working class area so well depicted by Richard Dreyfus in the movie version of Richler’s “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz”. I went to Bancroft School on St Urban at least until we finally moved to our 2000 square foot bungalow on an entire 1/4 acre of land, in the newly emerging post war “burbs” at age 11 with 4 of my 5 siblings, my older brother having left for Vancouver. I couldn’t have imagined how far away it was, but do know that when we flew out to his wedding in 1958, just before, or was it after…”a senior moment”… Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valenz went down, it took 27 hours to get there via Air Canada. Really.
We had enough room so that my 9 year old brother and I could share a room, not a sofa like before, and a big enough back yard that we could toss a football. We could both throw a baseball hard enough so that the neighbor’s could have a “thud” turn into a “crackle”. Baseball seemed to just stop completely after I broke the bedroom window.

I can probably blame my less than stellar athletic career on little else than having grown up on less than 1/4 acre.

It was also undoubtedly responsible for my “passages” through the developmental years and my mechanisms of satifying my ambitions. By developmental years, I mean the transition that we all go through as we involute, meno(mano)pause. Yeah, that happens somewhere between 40 and 70, but sometimes never.

So it should come as no surprise, that someone with a beginning like mine, and particularly “ascending” to the top 3%, if not 1%, should realize, like most Americans, that there are some simple joys in owning your own small business, and struggling through tough times, with the same fear and angst that the overwhelming majority is feeling, even though it brings back painful memories of my parents’ struggles.

I admit, than when times were good, I might have been foolish and or lazy enough to get into some “bonehead” investments, with not enough due diligence on my part. I had neither time nor interest and imagined that times would never change.

But when it comes to putting food on the table, and keeping homes and small business alive, in very difficult economic times, doesn’t it make sense to let people borrow their own money with no penalty to stay afloat?

The banks aren’t doing it, from my understanding, and big business is still turning profits.

It doesn’t matter to me and my 401K, now 201k, because I have no penalties at my age, but wouldn’t it be a stimulus to help the declining middle class (us) and their businesses and startups? If they are fortunate enough to at ages under 59 1/2 to have funds in an IRA or retirement plans, chances are that some of it is in in big business stock or mutual fund. If they feel that they want to take the risk that they can outperform the returns even longterm on their IRA investment, why not? Why should they be penalized.

We’re beginning to realize, that with an aging population, even social security and medicare are at risk of serious cuts. At the same time, we’re reminded never to underestimate American ingenuity and innovation and support and promote small business.

I read last week, in the Sac Bee, that 20% of women are now enrolled in Ag programs in the US. I’ll bet most of them, let alone men, are going to be small business people. I suspect that the same trend is at play in those over 30 and not in college, as they wait for new job openings, not just in ag, but in all small businesses that they might want to start in lieu of the job that they’re never going to get/get back.

It’s not really a tax break is it? At least if it’s not invested in TBills.

I got to thinking about this because Julie, who is a mere 44 year old, would love to start a fiber mill…now if only she had an IRA…

So….what am I missing?

Happy New Year!

Ken

I can probably blame my less than stellar athletic career on little else than having grown up on less than 1/4 acre.

It was also undoubtedly responsible for my “passages” through the developmental years and my mechanisms of satifying my ambitions. By developmental years, I mean the transition that we all go through as we involute, meno(mano)pause. Yeah, that happens somewhere between 40 and 70, but sometimes never.

So it should come as no surprise, that someone with a beginning like mine, and particularly “ascending” to the top 3%, if not 1%, should realize, like most Americans, that there are some simple joys  in owning your own small business, and struggling through tough times, with the same fear and angst that the overwhelming majority is feeling, even though it brings back painful memories of my parents’ struggles.

I admit, than when times were good, I might have been foolish and or lazy  enough to get into some “bonehead” investments, with not enough due diligence on my part. I had neither time nor interest and imagined that times would never change.

But when it comes to putting food on the table, and keeping homes and small business alive, in very difficult economic times, doesn’t it make sense to let people borrow their own money with no penalty to stay afloat?

The banks aren’t doing it, from my understanding, and big business is still turning profits.

It doesn’t matter to me and my 401K, now 201k,  because I have no penalties at my age, but wouldn’t it be a  stimulus to help the declining middle class (us) and their businesses and startups? If they are fortunate enough to at ages under 59 1/2 to have funds in an IRA or retirement plans, chances are that some of it is in in big business stock or mutual fund. If they feel that they want to take the risk that they can outperform the returns even longterm on their IRA investment, why not? Why should they be penalized.

We’re beginning to realize, that with an aging population, even social security and medicare are at risk of serious cuts. At the same time, we’re reminded never to underestimate American ingenuity and innovation and support and promote small business.

I read last week, in the Sac Bee, that 20% of women are now enrolled in Ag programs in the US. I’ll bet most of them, let alone men, are going to be small business people. I suspect that the same trend is at play in those over 30 and not in college,  as they wait for new job openings, not just in ag, but in all small businesses that they might want to start in lieu of the job that they’re never going to get/get back. 

It’s not really a tax break is it? At least if it’s not invested in TBills.

I got to thinking about this because Julie, who is a mere 44 year old, would love to start a fiber mill…now if only she had an IRA…

So….what am I missing?

Happy New Year!

Ken

Coccura and “death cap”

My older sisters Arlene and Rhoda both spent a very nice visit to Renaissance Ridge last week. One of the highlights was a brief “walk in the woods” in the Sierra where we looked for the first mushrooms of the fall season. Arlene is a retired chef with a very well trained palate and technique and experience to bring out some incredible edibles, but also has become interested in mycology. We have only had a couple of brief showers so far after 3 months with nary a drop of rain, but just in the last week I’ve been able to pick up at least 15 varieties in the acre or so of oak forest on our property.

 I found Agarica californicus, agaricus campestris (meadow mushroom), amanita calyptroderma (coccura), conocybe tenera (brown dunce cap), amanita phalloides (the  “death cap”) and several others…I think!

It looks easy enough from the pictures. Arlene sent me a copy of “The National Audubon Society Field Guide”. I’ve learned how to do spore prints and am getting KOH so that I can to stains and spore analysis. I’ve added at least a dozen websites to my “favorites” list and pored over hundreds (thousands?) of pictures and descriptions including those on:

http://www.mykoweb.com/CAF/index.html

Now, I’ve made a lifetime of poring over clinical findings, data and minutiae trying to exercise clinical judgement. Here is an opportunity to transform a retired ob-gyn’s ardor for the clinical diagnosis. Take the picture above: On the left you have Coccura:

http://www.mykoweb.com/CAF/species/Amanita_lanei.html

 I’ve read that it is a choice mushroom that tastes a lot like portabellas. Now that’s something that I could sink my teeth into. I’m reminded of a very good meal in a restaurant in Venice. In the very little travelling that I have done, I had a grilled portabello with a fried egg on top with a very nice regional red wine. Unforgetable.

 I hate travel and reckon that we have everything that any Mediterranean country has right here in the Sierra Foothills. Why not take advantage of our bounty right here in the good old US of A!

Well, if you read the description for Coccura, under edibity, it says “Choice, with caution” in the Audubon manual and the California website says “Edible, but often not recommended due to the toxic Amanitas”. Which Amanita? Easy, peazy…it’s the deadly Amanitas phylloides:

http://www.mykoweb.com/CAF/species/Amanita_phalloides.html

 I’ve got that. In fact the picture above has the two of them in tandem. Coccura on the left. 3 “death caps” on the right…I think!

So why am I wasting the time of any poor soul who is an alpaca breeder with jibberish on mushrooms?

It ought to be obvious. Pictures are good but analytical data (spore prints and microscopy vs histograms and skin follicle density testing) is better.  As is an independent assessment by an expert (judge).

No one tool trumps another, but the combination of all of them combined with an independent ”taste test” (i.e. proven genetics), is a boon to establishing a quality breeding program. It’s takes a lot of hard work and analysis, but it’s not nearly as hard as trying to find a “perfect swing” that has been elusive for a quarter of a century at the now mature age of 65.

Anytime that you’re in the area, we would be more than happy to cook up a bowl of homemade mushroom soup! But Julie won’t let you eat it!

Not all congenital disorders follow a single gene pattern of inheritance so there is often more than 1 gene locus involved. A good example of this might be breast cancer in women, cleft lip and palate in children and likely choanal atresia in alpacas. From what I understand there are very likely many, if not most instances, where it isn’t even inherited at all but might be environmental in pregnancy. So there isn’t a “one size fits all” explanation.

Even in the instances when there is a genetic component, there is often a spontaneous mutation responsible for the disorder and it is not found in either parent.

In humans, from my understanding, and unless someone has better data, up to 3% of newborns have some type of birth “defect” and only 0.5% of them are felt to be genetic. Even fewer have well recognizable patterns of chromosomal inheritance. A good example are congenital heart defects.

While it may be “prudent” to cull any known or suspected “birth defects” in livestock, I have the feeling that people in livestock management are far too quick to assume that there is an single inherited pattern responsible for birth anomalies. Most recently, I’ve been pre-occupied with “extra teats”.

I know that supernumary nipples are incredibly common in humans and occur anywhere along the primordial milk line, from the anterior armpit, all the way down to the vulva (in humans). In fact I’ve even seen several vulvar nipples in humans, and have come to recognize that they are nothing that deserves more than a mention.
In many cases, the woman that I would see was told that they might have a suspicious “mole” and should have it surgically removed.

The majority are simply nipples, with no underlying breast tissue…so they are not really “teats”, don’t produce milk and it is hard (for me) to imagine how a baby, or cria, could be convinced to suck on them, or how it might cause problems in early growth and development. I’ve seen extra nipples immediately adjacent the usual normal one and actually collecting from the same teat…hard
to find unless you look closely.

So I did a google search and find that 7-20% of ALL mammals, across species have supernumary nipples…about as common as being left handed!
What’s more, I’ve seen it in cria who I’m certain have no evidence of extra nipples going back 2 generations on either side, and alternatively seen moms who have extra teats and several cria, none of which have them.
Despite that, we consider it a “fault” in the show ring (though it’s never checked) . and unless it has changed, the Canadian registry won’t register females with extra teats…I guess males with extra teats are OK.
My point here is NOT that I’m promoting breeding for extra teats, if that were possible, but that not sure where the bias towards this condition and it’s supposed heredibilty came from, how it was ascertained, and how it is clinically relevent, but it is an example, in my mind, of a questionable alpaca “axiom” …but I digress…

I have the feeling that there is an assumption, by some, that identifying the base sequence in a genome, will give us a ready roadmap, routes marked, as to what is responsible for all that ails us, (or alpacas), when in fact, it might be more akin to telescope with which to explore the universe, with far more still unknown than known. Don’t even get me started on the certainty that some folks have in understanding color genetics, and grey in particular…

According to the headlines in today’s Sacramento Bee, this “global weirding” is the result of a “perfect storm” and California has not been this wet since 1983, a year that produced record Sierra snows. This year’s La Nina’s cooling effect on equatorial waters is being tampered with by an “unusual Arctic effect…”, presumably produced by warming, …”which is pushing cold air and a vigorous jet stream down into the US and Europe”. No wonder we’re having deadly blizzards in the US east and Europe and tornados not just in the the American heartland, but Massachusetts and California.

I hate the heat and I’m still working vigorously in the garden …ergo the sore hip.  With a temperature 20 degrees below normal, and rain expected to continue the next 3 days (at least), I expect to have to deal with this sore hip until I am eligible for medicare in August. There’s no way I’m shelling out $4K in deductibles, from my already ridiculously expensive health insurance, when it’s probably just a tendinitis, bursitis, sacroiliitis or some other damn …itis. OK so that’s the down side of retirement and becoming a senior.

The upside is that I own my time. I have a strong suspicion that the sore left hip was predisposed to by having carried a “beeper” on my right hip for 40 years, resulting in poor posture and repetitive motion from quick change in position having to reach for a phone in order to respond to a potentially urgent call in less time than it would take one of Pavlov’s dogs to start salivating at the sound of a bell.

Since I failed dismally, despite years of persevering, at golf and hate travelling (I’m OK with destinations…I just hate getting there) , it left me little choice but to transfer all my manic energy into, among other things, alpaca breeding and gardening. Admittedly, alpaca breeding is more than an idle pasttime…we need it to pay our bills, but our high energy activity has been fueled by a confluence to rival that of La Nina/ Arctic Oscillations, and I wouldn’t want to have it any other way.

Yes…there is a synergy, symbiosis, resonance between the 2 activities:

Both require great patience. I’ve got plantings that are just becoming established 10 years after having moved to”not so sunny” California. Establishing incremental improvement in a herd is likewise painstaking work, requiring researching pedigrees, show records, fleece data and fieldwork.

Both require physical labor…it helps if it is a labor of love.

Both result in better physical and mental well being. I have no doubt as to the health benefits from moderate activity and the zen mode attainable from staying connected to nature.

Both are in perfect harmony, if for no other reason than :

             This…

produces this …

which produces this…

Click to view slideshow. 

How much luckier can one guy be?

Renaissance Ridge Alpacas

Peacemaker's Fleece

RR Guns' Peacemaker

At I.A.O. 2010, under a 3 judge panel, Peacemaker was summarily given the gate in the grey class, even though I’m wondering if he’s one of the best alpacas that we’ve produced out of our program. I had the opportunity to discuss his dismissal with the international judges and was informed that “there is no such thing as a grey without a full tuxedo”…

At MOPACA 2011, I was told, by an excellent AOBA judge that the AOBA (arbitrary) show rules specifically now say that a rose grey cannot have a fawn base but the dark fibers need to be brown…

Not too worry. We would have loved to have competed but it doesn’t matter, at least at this time, for our breeding decisions. Peacemaker is not for sale and I suspect will be dating a number of his second cousins in the very near future. We are breeding for grey and believe that there is every reason to believe that it can be bred for in a commercial market ( solid rose gray with minimized tuxedo for maximum fleece utility).

Of course we can only say that because we’re brash, delusional or sufficiently misinformed to dare to proceed into such a venture, but we’re working from a very different operational scheme than most grey breeders.

It appears from everything that I have read over the last few years that there are no shortage of “theories” on greys, but there is very little based on fact or science. There is a promise by some that we are very close to an understanding of the subject because we are going to “crack” the alpaca genome. From my understanding, all that means is that we will have another code to break in trying to assess the functions of the individual nucleic acid sequences and the proteins that they program. It will still take time to decipher and not be a “ready to read” roadmap. More likely we will have an incomplete atlas with some of the roads mapped but a lot of highways and biways “under construction”.

So here’s what I’m thinking…

One of the first thing s that I read when I first got started was Eric Hoffman’s “The Complete Alpaca Book” and was fascinated by a section on page p4-5 (2nd edition) telling us that there was a common ancestral camelid some 35 million years ago, but it’s evolution in North America dates to 9-11 million years.

A wild form, Hemiauschenia, crossed the isthmus of Panama into South America some 3 million years ago. Hemiausechenia eventually evolved into 2 genera Paleolama and Lama some 2 million years ago. Paleolama became extinct 12,000 years ago leaving only Lama (the wild guanaco) and Vicugna (the wild vicuna) in South America

We also know that all 6 known camelid species are able to crossbreed and produce fertile offspring. They include the Bactrian and Dromedary camels, guanacos, vicunas llamas and alpacas. If alpacas formed a separate genetic entity from a distinct llama population , I wonder what the process of natural selection might have looked like and how it might have been influenced through 6 millenia of breeding pressure.

Just “shooting from he hip”, I” imagine” that the earliest domestic alpaca was fawn with vicuna pattern (no surprise here) and there then appeared at least 4 color mutations out of the 2 pigments, phaemelanin and eumelanin i.e fawn/brown as suggested “reds” by Liz Paul, possessing phaemelanin and maroon/ black as eumelanin producers.

 I have to agree with Nancy Rehbok that bay blacks are ultradark browns and maroons are a recessive eumelain (black ) allele, at least until proven otherwise. Here’s what Nancy has proposed:

There are the 7 genes and their allelles, the most nt allelle listed first.

 A genes : A+ Vicuna pattern pheamelanized animal, A pheamelanized solid color, a+ eumelanin color with tan underbelly, a eumelanized animal.

 B genes- instructs for eumelanin form B black, b maroon

 C genes- dilutes both pigments but affects phemelanin more than eumelanin, can increase the size of light underbelly to the sides of the animal up mid side, incompletely nt and cummulative. C full color- no dilution, c+ mild dilution, fawn to light fawn, true black to bay black, c moderate dilution, cb maximum dilution, maroons can be pink or beige, blacks can be tan, fawns can become BEWs

D dusty gene- a double recessive pulls out fleece er giving a chalky appearance, combo with dilution genes can make blacks look steely gray. D full er, d chalky, flat coloring to fleece.

E genes- (ok not Mc1 r) but there is a gene that does this. Works in relation with A genes. Ed extra dark eumelanin (black or maroon on B genes), gives either black or maroon overlay to pheamelanized animals, or in eumelanized animals gives the true deep color that do not tip out, E gives dark face and feet (color on feet travels further up on A animals than A+ animals) on pheamelanized animals- but points can also be diluted to gray because of dilution genes. On eumelanized animals the color tips out in blacks and maroons. e a double dose retricts eumelanin production so that eumelanized animals appear white, pheamelanized animals have no significant dark coloring at points

M- disrupts eumelanin somehow turning black to silver, maroon to rose-gray blotchy in it’s effect.Not obvious in Pheamelanized animals but may cause color inconsistency even in these. M disruption of eumelanin, m+ mild disruption of eumelanin, may be the culprit of spotting in black or maroon animals, m has no action on eumelanin.

W- disrupts both eumelanin and pheamelanin. WW may be lethal. Easily modified so that color can come through depending on other factors W will make animals white, pinto, appaloosa, paint, piebald are all W made. w has no action. (Nancy Rehbock)

I also “imagine” a completely different gene locus that causes dark spotting on all of these base colors. It’s dominant, with a very variable penetrance, sometimes skipping a couple of generations. Then there is the “melanoblast distribution gene” which is responsible for “delivering the color”.

I remember learning some 4 decades ago about how the fertilized ovum becomes a blastula, then blastomere, then blastocyst , then trophoblast and embryoblast are differentiated and the embryoblast is like a 3 layered pancake (ectoderm, mesoderm and endoderm) which will bend and fold and with the precision and timing of an olympic gold medal diver mold itself into a cria.

Then…at a very specific time in the embryonic time clock…from a small pore on the top pancake (ectoderm, specifically neurectoderm) called the “neural crest” showers all of the ectoderm with “melanoblasts” which head out like F 15s to settle among other places in the hair follicles;

 http://www.ehd.org/slideshow-images.php?slide=34

The melanoblasts, now melanocytes, settle into the population of stem cells in the hair follicle and depending on the genetic message, produce either phaemelanin or eumelanin in the melanosomes of their cytoplasm, which is then deposited into the orthocortex of the hair.

If it produces eumelanin, you get black or maroon, if phaemelanin, you get fawn through bay black. Furthermore, white is a result of no melanin and roan is a result of intermittent, or sputtering of pigment into follicle populations or possibly the individual melanosomes, the cell organelles that store, then release the pigment, creating a stippling effect.

Grey myths (in my mind)…

1) There is a different gene for solid roans and tuxedo roans, the former being recessive, the latter dominant.

2) Roaning does not include a fawn shade of phaemelanin

3) A solid red (rose) grey (no spots) is really a contaminated fawn.

My response to the myths…

1) Our breeding results clearly demonstrate a dominant grey patten using Gun’s ‘n Roses first fifty or so cria, with over ½ being grey, and ½ of those being “modern”, or solid, but after 3 years I can’t give accurate numbers to prove it….here’s why… Firstly, there is no absolute difference between the two…they are a continuum.

I would first submit GnR himself, who is, mistakenly, the poster boy for modern rose grey on the AOBA show website is not a “modern” but a mini-tux, easily proven by just one breeding result, in my opinion: Bred to solid brown (Melani), GnR, has produced Gun’s Next of Kin, an unmistakable “tuxedo grey”:

Aussie Guns n Roses

Melani

RR Guns' Next of Kin

Moreover, these are all tuxedos from our own herd…

RR Guns of Navarone

Kit Carson and Next of KinGuns n Roses

RR Rose Godiva

Sakura

RR Guns ‘ Peacemaker

The best summary that I could find relating to mechanism differentiation of melanocytes was in an article by Parichy et al:

I could find no evidence that the pattern is determined by a gene that affects the melanoblast, but instead suggested that it is in fact chemotactic peripheral dermal factors that attract melanin to the skin, to begin production of melanin by melanocytes some time later. What is the evidence that there is a single gene that controls both pattern and color in alpacas??

Any incomplete centripetal migration of melanoblasts, in my opinion, is a “tuxedo”. Moreover, solid greys, are an extension of the migration of those that have less expression of the “incomplete melanocyte migration gene” so that the pigment does not stop short of the ectodermal disc, in the 3 layered pancake of the embryoblast, discussed above. As a result, all the stem cell populations in the hair follicles are populated and thereby pigmented.

I suspect that the “incomplete (or delayed) melanocyte gene” is simply a result of how late the “embryonic clock” initiates melanoblast migration. Turn on the operator gene early, you fill in all the developing follicles. Start a few hours or days late, and the window of opportunity for melanoblasts to migrate into the hair papillae vanishes and you have “empty follicles” at the extremeties of the ectodermal disc which develop into the head, tail and limb buds; in quantities from very little to a lot, depending on the “lateness”.

This is nothing new. This is how cleft lip and palate develop in the human embryo, when the 2 “half faces” fuse in the midline to form a complete face. It is also why approximately 2% of women have “Mullerian fusion defects”, in which the 2 developing hemiuteri (or uteruses), fail to fuse in the midline, and can causes defects resulting in everything from a simple incomplete uterine septum, to a double uterus, to even a double vagina. The bilateral “mesonephric ducts” that form the kidneys, can do the opposite and actually fuse in the midline, to form a single “horseshoe kidney”. It is impossible to understand patterning genes without understanding embryologic development.

The patterns of migration can sometimes also be very specific, rather than just centripetal, as in appaloosas, and in horses the Overo, Tobiano and Sabino, the latter 3 all being dominant.

It is not clear to me why there is felt to be a single gene in grey that is felt to be responsible for melanin production, roaning effect, dark spotting and incomplete embryonic melanin migration. I wonder if it does not make more sense to have the melanocyte migration gene on a separate but closely linked gene locus and that we might have an explanation for the relatively common vicuna pattern that we see on many of our solids. It would fit our breeding results better to presume that the tuxedo and vicuna pattern are on the same gene locus:

RR Rose la Reina

RR Rose Aliyah

RR Rose Serenade

They are all fawns out of Guns n Roses. They are not “contaminated” with white fibres. Much has been made of the inheritance pattern of solid greys based on ARI cria registration results of a couple of well known “index” solid roan herdsires. I do not know enough about those notable studs’ genotype to reconcile their cited lack of grey transmission, but do believe that any conclusions based on their ARI data, if they are indeed genotypic greys, are likely to be very inaccurate, and here’s why:

RR Rose Delilah is out of Guns n Roses and a medium fawn damn… She had a very successful show career including a color championship at a very competitive CABA show at 22 months in what was unmistakably solid fawn. After her first shear,  she is a very obvious solid rose grey.

This all occured after her first yearling shear. We have seen this in a number of our offspring, enough so that even if I wanted to, I would have a hard time making sense of mode of transmission, unless there was a means of “adjusting” color accuracy for the ARI database at 3-4 years of age. We tend to register our cria before 6 months age, as I suspect do most breeders. We tend not to take the trouble to change the registration color data, so pay no attention to it when looking for breeding outcome predictions from Guns n Roses. I can say that we are getting roughly ½ greys with those equally divided between “tuxedos”, mostly mini-tuxes, and solids.

Can I be more specific? Not unless I report data only on offspring over 3 years of age, based on Delilah and other cria, who have emerged as better expressed greys after their first shear. In our breeding scheme, I’ve come to believe that it is far easier to breed for rose greys without spots, than it is solid silver greys without spots. I’m not sure why , but it may be that fawn to brown greys (roans) are more closely related to the original “natural” roan mutation and silver greys are the mutation after it has interacted with the eumelanin (black/maroon) gene.

Ultimately, any science that I would look for however has it’s limitations and the art of breeding kicks in and each of us has to use our God given senses and  analytic faculties to decide what we individually, are breeding for.

Musings…

I suspect that in the melange that constituted the earliest breeding stock, all colored alpacas showed evidence of a dominant dark spot gene, but that it may have more effectively been bred out of the lighter solid colors by more intense breeding pressure . It is not a very penetrant gene and even shows up in the best whites, and fawns/browns from time to time and “skips a generation”. In solid colors, it tends to be minor factor in premium lines, because even when present it is usually small and not on the blanket. This is generally not significant and evidence (perhaps) that the extent of spotting, is heritable. I do not believe that a minor dark spot is likely to cause a major problem with pigment distribution in progeny, at least based on my observations, and if it does, it is rare.

It is easy for me to imagine that in a tiered Incan society, the most prosperous breeders were able to select for the scarcer solids and they were at a premium. These breeders, even before the Spanish conquest and widespread llama hybridization, might have been more likely not to have a few bad seasons where they would be forced to breed for huarizos rather than pure alpacas, since hunger is a stronger motivator than cold.

I suspect that less prosperous breeders were more likely to breed the less desirable (for fiber) greys, which might have had more llama genetics and fiber characteristics. I would love to know how many “elite” breeding programs there were in Incan times for grey. Is the improvement in fiber quality all in recent (decades) breeding practices or has it been brewing for centuries?

 Is it possible that there is something in how the different pigments (phaemelanin , eumelanin, intermittent melanin i.e. roan and no melanin i.e. whites ) interact with the follicular stem cells. Maybe the characteristics currently being bred into the best fawns and whites will never be manifest in greys and blacks because eumelanin affects embryologic follicle maturation and/or postnatal development of curvature, fineness, density etc so that the best grays or blacks will never have fiber that looks like the best fawns/browns with phaemelanin, or white with no melanin.

2) As to roans not having fawn as a base color:

Where to begin…For one thing I can’t think of any biologic variables, other that don’t have means and standard deviations in form and function. Not only do I believe  that there are between fiber variations in pigment, but that there are “within” color variations. If we could measure the “nano” amounts of eumelanin and phaemelanin in each fiber, I suspect that there would be a mean and standard deviation. I suspect that there is a purer white, purer fawn etc…and finding that, barring a revolution in technology, will still be the domain of the artistry of the breeder and the experienced judge.

At this point, a tip of the hat to Paul Vallely, who is measuring “along fiber micron standard deviation”. I’ve seen the results and interpretation and the value of his testing as one more selection tool.

Going one step further, I’ve seen comments on forums that silver greys actually have “true grey fiber”. I even heard that used as an argument that it is that distinction that supports that recognizing fawn greys is “muddy” because it includes too many contaminated fawns.

The “true grey” fiber, would not surprise me, given biologic variability. Somewhere even between the “true white” and the “true black”, despite the roaning effect, there are going to be less white fibers and less black fibers, within the same blanket, so that some are almost in the middle i.e. silver. Perfect…silver grey!

In fact the more of those fibers that are close to the median, the better, I would assume for purposes of uniformity and processing. And that should be true for every color from bright white to ultrablack.

For what it’s worth, I can’t see those fibers, and would have to rely on a microscope, especially in finer animals. I don’t doubt that they are there though, in both rose and silver grey.

So where exactly is the corresponding intermediate color that corresponds in the white/brown blanket to the silver seen in the white/black blanket? What is the “perfect rose”? I’m not sure, but since it isn’t clear from the AOBA color chart, I’m prepared to fail in my breeding plans, if it isn’t very close to Peacemaker. Hey I’m cool with that…risk assessment is something that I dealt with for 36 years professionally and I know that the best that I can do is come prepared.

Incredibly, the same argument for “contaminated fawns” seems to be less of a concern with contaminated whites/silver greys. I have seen a good number of blue ribbon and even banner winning alpacas show in silver grey  who appear very close to white, but on opening the blanket can easily be identified as almost certainly having less than 5% black fibers…it seems that there is far less concern with “contamination” in the silver series that rose. I suspect that it is far easier to identify black on white, than it is fawn or brown or white.

 To continue rambling…it also  makes more sense from anecdotal and personal observation that the original roan mutation was in the fawn brown series and silver grey arose after crossing those roans to blacks…

So here’s our breeding plan…

We believe that there is a possibility of breeding for commercial grey:

 We  believe that there are obvious advantages in breeding for an alpaca that can produce a solid roan color, with even distribution of pigment across an extensive blanket (minimized tuxedo) where the dark and light fibers are of equal micron, SD, and comfort factor so that there is no need for color blending or synthetic dyes.

Our biopsy results have provided us with a glimpse of the ability to estimate the percentage light and dark fibers, “in skin”, in each of the primary and secondary follicle populations. An explanation of that data can be found for Guns n Roses on this website under his listing. His distribution is very even for light/dark fibers in both primaries and and I wonder if that is a key to his ability to transmit solid roan with remarkable consistency.

In other words, I wonder if some of the index “solid grey” males that have been used to make the case for a separate recessive solid grey gene, have had very uneven light and dark color populations…that is to say that, for example, a male with 99% dark primaries , by biopsy, and 99 % light secondaries, is far less likely to produce solid grey than an alpaca with a 50:50 distribution in the primary/secondary fiber populations.

I also suspect that a good number of “indefinites” are in fact poorly expressed greys, even in those cases where they don’t completely “grey out” after a couple of years. In a case where “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”, it may be that these animals are ideally suited for a solid grey breeding programs, especially if they have excellent fiber.

I would expect that if these animals were randomly bred in a closed population, there would be a Hardy Weinberg equilibrium that would be reached with a close to 50:50 color distribution of dark and light fibers in these alpacas. Artificial selection decisions could engineer a more even distribution by matching biopsy -established darker light/dark animals with lighter ones, so that much like mixing paints, one could select which males should be bred to which females.

Of course, there needs to be excellent fiber improvement in all other respects as an overriding goal. Color alone is not our paramount fiber concern, and we place brightness, fineness, consistency, uniformity, density and length first.

We believe that breeding greys through the fawn/brown color lines results in much better fleeces than breeding though black or grey to grey. We are now inclined to breed our solid rose greys to each other, or to brown or fawn.

We still breed for solid fawn and brown to maintain candidates to breed back to our solid rose greys.

Our “classic” spotted rose greys, all silver greys and solid blacks are bred back to silver grey. We don’t know on what scale “traditional” tuxedoed and spotted greys will be commercially profitable through smaller mill scale production but believe that there will always be a market for “traditional grey”, and are continuing to breed for better quality. We love our silver greys, spots and all and don’t in any way mean to suggest that there is a better or worse.

If there is a long term commercial production of the beautifully variegated yarns that come off the backs of traditional and improving greys, that will be great.  Likewise, if both rose and silver grey fail to achieve success in a commercial setting, but cost more to produce because they being milled on a smaller scale, “we’re still there”…we just want it to be priced as the “champagne of fiber”…I might just have to have one of my grandkids finish the project.

As smaller breeders, we are enthusiastically embracing the model that given that we manage a herd on just 10 acres, that having an option to be “boutique breeders” for a quality rarer product will give us an edge in providing quality end product, but also quality breeding stock for any color.

We are limited by size in retaining only a finite number in our herd and can offer premium breeding stock in all colors. Check out what we have. If what we sell is what you are breeding for, call us. If you are interested in breeding for results and outcomes similar to ours, let us show you what we’ve done and if we can help you do the same.

 We are very proud of what we have been able to accomplish in just a few short generations and our successes in competition. We are producing grey fiber that rivals most of the best in any color by assessment of independent judges, evaluation by hand and measurable data such as histograms and skin biopsies.

 Not unlike any current theories on transmission of grey, there are undoubtedly “holes” in our breeding plans, but until we see better and more definitive explanations, it remains our breeding paradigm.

 One last thought…how many of the very best “contaminated” solids with superb fleece, who don’t fit into commercial solid cremello/fawn/brown might be excellent contributors to a “solid roan” program?

That’s our story and we’re sticking to it…

Ken