Thursday, March 4, 2010
Winter to Spring
As I write this, the temperature outside is pushing into the mid50's, the alpacas are suning themselves and looking for tender shoots of emerging grass and the remnant patchwork of snow cover is rapidly fading into memories of a long winter. Spring is definitely in the air!
Spring brings a fury of activity to Heritage Farm. Birthing season is fast approaching and show season starts for us in a matter of days. Thoughts of fixing fences and repairing barns take a higher priority after the relative inactivity of winter.
Sure, winter has pleanty of activties as well. Alpacas continue to need feed, water and care; but I tend to use the winter months to update herd and financial records, plan the next season's breedings and to stragegize how to better our alpaca business in the new year.
I also spent a lot of time this winter updating my alpaca management software, Alpaca Herd WORKS. I just released a new version with added features and enhancements. I originally developed Herd WORKS to help us manage our herd of 40 suri alpacas. As the alpaca industry continues to evolve, I think the necessity of keeping more thorough records will become even more important. Those buying our alpacas will want to see data that backs up the marketing hype and farms that can produce that data will be better positoned for success in the future.
An enhancement to Alpaca Herd WORKS that I am particularly excited about is a new module called myHERD. myHERD is an acronym for my Herd Evaluation Records Database and is designed to be a tool to help you evaluate each production alpaca in your herd on characteritics such as fiber, conformation, and maternal or paternal traits. After scoring each alpaca, the software automatically complies a report that displays a sorted list of the scores each alpaca received on these traits. By analyzing this report, you can make more objective decisions on your breeding program.