Sheep, wool, and dogs

[altivo]

In spite of a developing head cold, went to the Wisconsin Sheep and Wool Festival as planned. My friend Susan and I had never been before. The typical two barns full of vendors' booths, of course, selling everything from felting needles to raw wool. At least it wasn't all yarn, though the preponderance of foreign made alpaca products was distinctly noticeable. The alpaca pyramid scheme in the US is collapsing now, and overpriced animals are not selling. Those who bought into the scam late are desperate to find a profitable way to get out of it. Alas, I doubt that flooding the market with alpaca yarn or socks knitted offshore somewhere is going to do the trick.

What we enjoyed most, though, was the herding dogs. They had demonstrations, instinct testing for untrained dogs, and a full sized competition going on. We also saw new born lambs (both of us have seen plenty of them before, but they're always cute) and exotic sheep breeds, including the Barbados which looks like a goat, and the Jacob which often has FOUR horns instead of just two.

Met up with other guild members at noon, exchanged pleasantries and delivered items for the show in October, and we were off, getting home a little after three in the afternoon. I let Tess out into the pasture and collapsed, the cold symptoms having become too much for me.

Now off to bed, as soon as I take some medicine that will hopefully let me breathe and sleep.

Comments

[frith]

I'm taking note of the crumbling alpaca market. 8-) I guess I can stop saying that a top alpaca is worth $50k.

[altivo]

Not that one ever was worth that much, but yeah. The claims were absurd from the very beginning. All one had to do was a little spreadsheet projecting costs against returns to see it.

[mondhasen.livejournal.com]

I have this odd little memory of helping with a lambing when I was nine or ten: sitting in a small, rickety shed, one bare bulb, middle of the night, holding a newborn. Elation and tears. Mother was having trouble. All ended well.

Hope you're feeling better soon.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Fortunately we never have had a problem birth here. Go to bed, in the morning, "Hey, here's a new lamb." My horse had her foal the same way years ago. I knew she was close to time, but at 10:30 pm she was calmly eating hay so I went to bed. Got up at 12:30 to check on her and the new baby was already up and walking around. It was her fourth, so she evidently knew just what to do.

[schnee.livejournal.com]

Wow - there was not just a housing bubble, but also an alpaca bubble? No wonder the economy collapsed the way it did. c.c

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Not really a bubble, since it doesn't affect the larger economy to any great extent. But it was/is a pyramid scheme, in which buyers are given false information about how much profit they will make. Animals that can be purchased for nominal amounts in South America are sold for as much as $25,000 apiece in the US. The only way to recoup that kind of cost is by breeding them to death and selling each offspring at a similarly high price. This all started about 15 years ago and now has saturated, aided no doubt by the larger economic collapse.

[schnee.livejournal.com]

Ah, interesting. Hmm, 25000 US dollars, and people didn't get suspicious or investigate?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I'm sure many people caught on and rejected the scheme right away, just as I did. But there are plenty around who fell for it, just as with any cleverly created scam. Those who are looking for the "get rich quick" scheme are always vulnerable. I wasn't looking to get rich, I just thought I'd like to have an alpaca or two. Now that I've looked into the thing, the scam becomes obvious.

They ask as much as $25,000 for a female. They recommend you buy two females and a male to start, and of course breeding is the object though they claim you will also make money off the wool. The trouble is, pregnant females don't produce much good wool. And the males, though they produce a good quality if well cared for, don't produce all that much either. Your $12,000 male will not live long enough to pay back his cost in wool sales. Forget about the females. The only way to make money is to keep the females continuously pregnant and sell the offspring at the same high prices you paid. Obviously this was going to burst eventually, when there were no longer enough gullible people to dump their life savings into alpacas.

They started selling "shares" in animals so the entry cost was less. So you could buy half an alpaca or a quarter of an alpaca. They tried selling shares in just the wool, which was an obvious absurdity because the market is flooded with the wool and it can be purchased outright for less than the cost of such shares. (While they've managed to block up imports of animals from South America, they can't block import of the wool for reasons I'll give next.)

Few of the alpaca owners knew anything about yarn production or marketing. They thought handspinners and woolen mills would come begging for the wool. It didn't happen. They formed cooperatives to get a better cost level on producing yarn, and started shipping their wool back to South America for spinning and dyeing (there's more expertise on alpaca there, and US woolen mills are scarce now in any case) and then having the finished yarn brought back here for marketing. They still can't match the price of yarn that was grown in South America and spun there, though. I expect a lot of alpacas to be for sale at much cheaper prices within another year or two.

[schnee.livejournal.com]

*noddles* Aye - makes you wonder if alpaca meat will make a sudden appearance on the menus soon...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Heh. They do eat it in South America, but given the hoops it would have to go through to be approved for sale in the US, I don't think we'll see that. Americans are not very accepting of new meat sources in any case. A major push to promote ratites (emu, ostrich) as a source of low cholesterol meat here was an utter failure when the meat just didn't gain acceptance. Heck, at the moment the pork industry is complaining that fear of "swine flu" has caused their sales to crash. I'm not sure I believe people are that gullible, but the claim keeps being repeated.

[schnee.livejournal.com]

I'd be surprised if people weren't that gullible, actually. c.c

Ostrich is something you'll occasionally find over here, but it's never attracted a large following, probably in no small part because it's relatively expensive. I personally think it's nice and would like to see it used more often, but as usual, people stick with the devil(s) they know.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

*feeds you a hot honey and lemon drink and pets your head while you rest* Poor horsey, it's because of your big noses that you suffer so.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

*sneezes*

Oops, didn't mean to blow you across the barn, sorry.

[dragon-moon.livejournal.com]

Hope you're feeling better soon. Sounds like you had a good time! Herding dogs are amazing. Lambs are what I miss the most - we raised sheep when I was in school, and they were simply adorable.

The Barbados look pretty neat - I was considering them because of the lack of need for shearing. Jacobs are pretty awesome though. Shetlands were the other breed we were looking into, especially since they might eat the blackberries that are starting to take over. *G*

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I like the Shetlands myself, both for their looks and their wool. Hair sheep like the Barbados are primarily used for meat production and I don't eat lamb or mutton at all.