Recent conversations with new and prospective alpaca owners prompted me to think about how we manage our farm during the winter months. Things vary quite a bit seasonally on a farm and winter has its own challenges.
Staying warm is challenge number one – not for the alpacas, but for us. Long underwear is a basic necessity and good warm work gloves and barn boots are just as important. As long as they are able get in out of the wind, the alpacas seem to manage the cold fairly well. While our barn doors are generally always open, we do slide them almost closed in the worst weather.
The biggest change in terms of managing our herd in winter is that they are feeding exclusively on hay and not on pasture. We have a large hay mow in a barn that is separate from where we house alpacas. But we can store a limited amount of hay in each barn and that helps a lot when a storm is forecast. Alpacas need water to drink even in the cold weather. We use heated hanging water buckets. Easy, safe, inexpensive.
We clean all of our barns every day. This can be a bit of a challenge in winter when things are pretty much frozen solid. Alpacas have communal “poop” piles, so cleaning is easier than with some livestock. We use shredded newspaper lightly covered with hay in their poop areas. This absorbs most of the urine, eliminating puddles that would freeze and be slippery, and makes it easy to scoop up all the mess. Cleaning poop piles outside, however, can be problematic. On really cold days, there’s no breaking up the solid piles, so on warmer days, there’s a little more to clean up. Of course, some piles get lost under snow and remain there until everything melts in the spring.
With the exception of the poop pile areas (bare gravel), our barn floors are covered with rubber stall mats. We scrape these mats clean with this tool which doubles as an ice chipper/scraper in winter. Rake, shovel, broom and scraper are all the tools we need to move the mess from the barn floor to muck buckets. The buckets then get carted off to the compost pile, which means we need chains for our tractor (just a lawn tractor which does poop hauling duty).
We do like our alpacas to get outside even in winter, so unless it’s snowing or (perish the thought) raining, we put hay outside on the snow. That means the alpacas need to be able to get outside and that’s where snow shovels and a snowblower come into play. We use the snowblower to create paths and open areas for the alpacas; they don’t seem to like walking through deep snow. But our alpacas know fresh hay is waiting and they seem content to spend a good part of the day outside, even in winter.
