Shearing season is coming to an end and that means it’s time for breeding season to begin at Snowshoe Farm! There are two sides to breeding season: breeding our own females and breeding females that belong to our clients.
For our own herd, breeding begins with the decision-making process – which females do we breed this year and to whom do we breed them? Do we have breedings that we’d like to repeat? Do we have young males to prove? Do we have maidens ready for their first breedings? Do we want to purchase an outside breeding for anyone? How many cria can we manage next year? Once we have a list of potential breeding pairs, behavior testing begins. This is an almost-daily ritual of bringing over a male and walking him by a female or putting him in a pen with a female and watching their behavior. Regular behavior testing and taking good notes as you observe the alpacas’ behavior are your best tools for managing alpaca breeding.
We keep a number of breeding males at Snowshoe Farm. We offer drive-by breedings (clients bring their females by for a breeding and then take them home), very limited mobile breedings (we bring our male to you) and we also board females while they are here for breeding. This last option works best for maidens and for clients who are too far away for drive-bys to be practical. We also lease some of our herdsires for short periods of time. This works well for farms who want to use the same male on several females and prefer to keep their females at their own farm.
Outside breeding clients will start arriving later this month. They are all fecal tested before arriving and go into a small barn, separate from our herd. Otherwise, the routine is the same: behavior testing, breeding and, after several weeks of refusing to rebreed, an ultrasound by our vet to determine the status of the pregnancy.
All in all, it’s a busy few months, but by mid-fall it comes to an end. Breedings that are done this summer will be births next summer and few of us here in the northeast are breeding for cold weather births.
To celebrate our 15th anniversary, we are offering 15% off all alpacas and breedings this year. That’s in addition to our already low breeding fees! Check out our herdsires and contact us with questions or to schedule a breeding.
