Inventory Time
Journal Entry, Week07, 2021-12-28
At the Alpacas at Windy Hill ranch, shearing the herd occurs in May-June timeframe. The ranch is a full-service breeding and 24/7 boarding ranch. So, when shearing happens, it includes all the alpacas on the ranch, whether Cindy owns them, or they are boarded. Each alpaca's fleece is bundled into its own package, labeled with its name & other identifying info. Each package, regardless of the individual alpaca's sex, age, or status includes a ziplock containing a small snippet of the prime fleece (to send to lab for fiber quality scoring), the "blanket" fleece (i.e., fleece from the body & skirt (belly) wrapped in craft paper), a bag of the neck fleece, and loose fleece from the haunches.
With over 200 alpacas on the ranch, it's a challenge to store & organize all the fleece packages. For boarded alpacas, the owners have 30 days to claim their fleece package/s. Usually, Cindy ends up with many unclaimed packages, storing all the packages in a small, multi-purpose building on the ranch.
Doing inventory is a multi-step process in preparation for processing the fleece. How the fleece will be processed depends on the quality of each set of fleece, i.e., deciding if it needs to be "scored" at the lab, whether it will be sent to the mill to be woven, turned into yarn, felted, etc. Today we sorted about two thirds of the packages, creating four piles: one for the blankets (called prime fleece), one for the necks (called seconds), one for the felter (called thirds), and lastly, a small pile of the ziplock prime fleece samples.
I forgot to take a pic of the ziplock pile.
Today's Shot Report
10 babies in the N-1 field got their monthly vitamin A&D shots & annual boosters.