HE QUIT HIS JOB TO RAISE ALPACAS

here we go [Music] I'm Kayla I'm Jeff we're from well we're homestead homies and you're watching off the good with Doug and city welcome to another exciting episode of awkward with Doug and Stacey and today must be back by popular demand today we are going to a place that I think you guys are gonna like get these field trip Fridays under our belt hope you guys are enjoying them really you're so talkative today I was watching the school bus approaching and we have to be careful it was like all over the shoulder driving crazy yeah we're going I'm really I've been looking forward to doing this we've had a post about it a couple times and reschedule and this one never going to and I think you guys are really gonna like this where we're going has a really neat story and they do a lot of neat things I'm really happy to go here so if you guys are been with our channel for a while you know that we raised now pakka's in the past we had a bunch of them that was her thing come on now then we got rid of them because there's you know high maintenance and for us it just wasn't an animal for the homestead that you know it was a good fit for us but we do like the animals and with me value the fiber that they give you know it's really good stuff to use yeah the manure is good too fiber is good for gloves socks and all that kind of stuff yeah pullovers and all that stuff we're sure nice how pack a sweater thing that you go I know you're not wearing today but I've been looking forward to that so you guys sit back relax hope you enjoyed today's field trip Friday and here we go [Music] darah high field trip Friday we're here we're at our package of Troy in Troy Missouri and this is the bottle man yeah this is his place we actually have a relationship when we first started looking into alpacas we actually came to his place talk to him about alpacas and all that stuff it was a glimmer in our eye yeah and then it turned out to be a thorn in our side and actually when we were getting rid of our alpacas he came up to last year we did shearing and we actually sheared them together and everything and then we ended up gifting them and letting them take the alpacas that we had left so they could come here and be with other alpacas and have a good home so they aren't having to get home because when we pulled up we saw one of our boy boys at all yeah as a matter of fact I'll link that video right here if you guys go back and watch that you can see when I have them in the barn that I built for him that cuz he was in trouble he was causing a little bit of trouble so Christian and Lorenzo we had two and Lorenzo would always bought Christian and he's still doing it here with you yeah yeah yeah so how long you been doing the alpacas though oma eight nine years yeah yeah 2008 yeah yep so now you're getting ready to bottle feed right now what's going on with that yeah well we've got it's really hot right now and the moms have a kind of a hard time with umph in their production and milk when it's this hot right away Missouri would get some pretty wide swings in in heat and so sometimes babies feel thirsty so like to feed them a little bit extra not too much like one bottle maybe a day or maybe two depending on on the baby just helps out the mom and keeps it and so that's what we're doing we're gonna bottle feed some babies yeah yeah yeah the pastures are really suffering right now the grounds cracking we probably mentioned this in the earlier video that you know we've had some pretty dry times the last month or two and even at our house the sister and waters you know we're gotten we have to get a little more conservative so Legrand's if you're watching this video when you guys come up make sure you're very conservative on our third water yeah we and there's another reason we got rid of the alpacas is because we don't have electricity and you know having fans to help cool them and we weren't able to do that so that was like a big thing so I guess right now we'll go do some bottle feeding show you guys how that process works talk about his farm here what he has going on right now we you know we fluctuate I try to have about 150 orders 15 at one time we had about 300 that for me that was a lot of work on the alpaca side right and mainly I make yarn so I wanted to make sure and be able to have time for that so so we were you served about 150 and that's been real manageable for me yeah and I think we're gonna be able to have a peek at his yarn setup and how he harvests is his fiber and then kind of that process so we're gonna go feed the babies so let's go okay okay I don't know I have no idea where they are not quite like my sheep calling they're gonna come you just wait a second that's the one that you like a lot this Excalibur he's coming to she's a sweetheart most people don't know that they don't like to be touched on the top of the head but they really they don't mind it on the neck so this is hilarious but this is her mother her mother never wanted to bottle feed her never wanted a nurse I hate to bottle feed her myself mom did not want a nurse er this is mom she never and she doesn't usually come I don't know if she's just yeah he's just interested in us today that's Excalibur I think he's got a good chance at the understood some great she there's two types of alpaca Maisie if you want to hold that you can feed Helen and that's caliber he's only been taking him yeah he's got it and he's got beautiful hair that girls would give lots of money for one yeah yeah he's got some good Sheen his father is Xavi the great it's great but you never kind of know what you're gonna get okay cookies out there I saw her she put her head up and she wants to come we're gonna have to so also you have the Great Pyrenees yeah that's hunter he they protect against number one killer of alpaca is domestic dog yes stray dogs off which is oh here's cookie yeah yeah yeah hmm are you dad Oh Oreo cookie so your daughter she helps feed and so it's kind of like a whole family business right that's right yeah and she also runs a market for us once a month or once it once a week yeah yeah she's gonna hurt two or three markets she does like six or seven markets a week that's how we sell my part right going to Barbara's okay so all over the area here yep every farmers market in the st. Louis area we do okay another one for her as cheap because she drinks too I mean she's a little bit old me if she could be weaned all right I'm just dunking off camera here but the moms don't wean the babies till about ten months old or even a year so I think let me pull this up girl she's so she's a Sri and Helen is a wakaya there's two different types of alpaca and they have different characteristics the series are a lowland alpaca and the wakaya are a but yeah the series are a lowland and the what kinds are a higher higher Lancer they handle the cold weather a little bit better than than the service her II don't quite handle it quite as well but in Missouri were fine but in the series also looked like they kind of have the wrong dreadlocks as they go yeah they do yeah these two girls are wakaya and 90% of the herd in the US okay yeah yeah that's what we had was the require yep well okay here we are we're gonna start the fiber processing part of the alpaca business and we're a fiber farm so all of our money comes from fiber and what I have here is a blanket and I'm assure as well and I advocate that alpaca owners learned this year because there are several different reasons why but mainly you need to be able to keep that profit and you need then it's a revenue stream for you if you know how to shear you can you can share for other people you could share your own animals and you get to know the fiber a lot better this is a really nice boy his name is Sundance and he is a super super you know fine alpaca and mainly after we shear him this is all his blanket but we need to go around and and just check to see if there's any debris or anything that we don't want in the fiber there's there's two parts of the fiber there's the cut in so this is where the Shearer went that was me but this is the shear shorn port a part of the fiber and on the back side you'll see that his fiber this is what was outside this is the outside part so I usually will look for little pills and things that will call cause blemishes in the yarn and I look for debris and this is going skirting I go around the blanket this is his blanket and we also use the seconds we use every ounce of fiber that comes off the alpaca we do not we share this set we don't throw anything away we we saved first the second and the third and you have different products for each one of those so I'm a big advocate are not leaving fiber on the animal the first the first or the blanket so it's from the shoulder to the rear end of the alpaca and it goes over their back and it goes from other midline on both sides so it's like a blanket right over the top of the alpaca and that's the best quality fiber that they're gonna produce that needs to go into yarn if there are quality alpaca now then there's there's parts of the leg remember the three quarters up on the leg down to the to one quarter of the leg that's called seconds and everything on their neck is also seconds and that can be used very effectively we actually make the same amount of money on that as we do on the fire on the on the yarn except we put it in a different product so you can do a lot of felted products with that we dryer balls makes a fabulous dryer ball actually seconds make a better dryer ball than bursts so you're actually using the right product for that if you're making your second year dryer balls out of your seconds so I've skirted this fleece I've gone around I've looked for any debris I've looked for like there's a burr and I take that bird out because that's not that's not gonna do anything good for your forever um so we're gonna look for and you can kind of feel as well there's no nothing else left in this that we want to take out and I've skirted all the way around there's anything that looks like a second I've taken it out I don't want to leave my primary blanket here for yarn making okay so after that then we're gonna go we tumble it so we want to get a lot of the dust and debris that the alpaca has rolled in they don't have any natural lanolin or like a lot of oils in there in their fiber so they use dust you know took to keep them to clean themselves so I can roll around and dust a lot and that and so we want to blow that dust out because it saves the machinery and saves on on processing time so our next step from from after skirting and after we've taken any debris the more debris we take out the better really saves in the long run if you try to process it when you haven't pulled out the debris you're gonna make a big mess so just pull out as much debris as you can and then we're gonna tumble it so we go over to the tumbler which is right over here so we're gonna tumble the fiber and it's gonna gonna blow all the dust and debris out of it so that we don't throw it through the machine go ahead and turn it on and this is how I tumbled this a little bit another way they'd be covering dust right now I'd say this takes 5060 after we take it after we tumble it then we're ready to move on to what's called it's a machine called the picker and we're gonna move over there now so we're gonna pick this and this is important because there's a lot of dirt still left in this fiber and if we don't pick the locks out and we don't separate this out the washer will not wash most of that dirt out so we want to wash that out so in order to do that we need to pick the fiber it's a little bit loud but we're gonna go ahead and run it and [Music] this is what a QA kickin it was like cotton candy that's right yeah Wow yeah yeah that is a cloud yep and then we then we take that and we're ready to move it into the washer but if we don't kick it then we're not gonna get all the dirt out so that's in there now we hit this way [Music] okay here's our washer and in this is where we put the all that that's in the room will go into each compartment these particular washers are designed not to felt the fiber really important because if you put it into a regular washer and it goes through the cycle of the agitation cycle with the hot water it's going to felt so these go really slowly it still uses about 120 degrees of water here's one that has finished the cycle and comes out like this so this is ready to go out on our drying rack so outside we have drying racks and we just spread this out and we let it dry so after we pick it then then we and we wash it then we take it to the dryer okay so after the drying rack then we would come to a machine called the separator and this is a really fabulous machine because as much genetic breeding as you can do with the alpaca sometimes you just can't get it perfect and the First's are the first there's company called guard hairs and then there's their secondary fibers and secondary fibers is what makes really soft yard guard hairs are usually they're very sparse they're neither throughout the blanket of the animal with really good breeding you can make the guard here it's very similar to the secondary hairs but sometimes you end up with an animal that just has too many guard hairs this machine takes those out so when we run a an animal through this machine we're just on the back end we get some really excellent fiber and we can and down on the bottom we get collected the guard hairs which we can actually do something with we can put them in with those seconds that we talked about before and we can make dryer balls so it's not a bad thing it's just to produce the best quality yarn we want to take those those guard hairs out so um so this is we're gonna run this real quick and we'll see what comes out the back end [Music] this is a black 30 aisle in the backside this fiber which is sunshine and then luster a day of the Missouri and the fluffiness of the Mathias so it's really the best of both fibers but I do find that you can still get a nice sheen with 20% and 80% papaya 20% Sri but if you if you put too much story in there lose the memory memory or get in front of my stars [Applause] after the separator then we move on to what's called the Carter this is the heart of the mill and this produced this texture your your fiber that you have washed and picton separated and it's gonna take out beautiful yeah I'm gonna kick it into roving and and so it's gonna when we turn it on we have to separate it very specifically into these blue marks otherwise it will create inconsistencies in the end product of the roving and inconsistencies will result in lumps in the art so we have to be very meticulous and laying it out exactly perfect so we're going to turn this on and we'll show you what comes out the back end which is going to be our roving which you can also make bats if for fiber artists that want to use batting for four you can use it for many different things but for for filth in animals or felted products of any kind hats or whatever you want to felt you can felt sheets soap yeah you can feel soap you can wrap it up with a bat that's really good we make dog beds and all kinds of cat beds and all different types of felt that anything you can do with felt you can do without packet but so this machine will make sheets of felt and it will also make roving which would be a long skinny strip which were is what we're going to show you now and and that's what the first step in making yarn so we have to turn this big square thing into a long strip and that's what we're gonna work on right now you might turn this on and come around to the back and we'll see it working [Music] okay so that in that then we we do go to a machine called the drop rain and that draw frame aligns the fibers even more these are pretty aligned and running this through a spinner or you could hand spin this very easily and this would be this is usually when we're selling roving for hand spinners it's usually in this format because you can control it a lot better but when you're dealing with machinery and trying to make the ironwork machine they don't have the touch in the feel that you need so we have to make it super consistent so in order to make it super consistent we have to go through another machine called the draw frame and but if you were gonna spin this by hand this works great and that's how we did it before before we had all this machinery we had Carter's very small quarters and we spun the yarn by hand which was great a lot of fun just really a lot of work that's all the fibers that I need to work on in the next year yeah it won't take me 1000 hours to complete that yeah that fiber so I hope to finish that by April when I will start this year again ok so this is the roving that we've attached to the back end of the of the spinner and this is what we use to spin our yarn now we're doing a little bit of gray roving it's gonna be in VR and I can pull it out a little bit I can give you a feel for what this yarn will ultimately look like because this is a single ply and then we're going to apply it together but that will be the gray yarn that we all have out of this animal when we're done this is a two ply sport weight yarn there are several different weights we do mostly sport weight there's also there's lace sport DK worsted so when you say sport weight what would they use that for maybe socks or socks is a bit thinner there are weight you are normally you're using it for mittens that's scarves you can that's not that you couldn't use lace weight or finger length for for those same items but they're going to be a lot thinner so in the in the fall we will typically do some fall weather wear that is finger length which is a lighter weight than sport right now we're gearing towards winter so we're starting to do more sport weight or thicker oh and I really like to do the thicker stuff although I have to say that right now the thinner stuff is a little bit you know more info but I really like the DK and the sport weight because it showcases the softness of nail packer really well when you go really thin you lose some of the softness but if you go sport or even DK or or worsted it just you know it just blows up into a really soft yarn and so I really like that the best but you know in that this is so we're gonna see this run this is the single ply and then after that we will fly it together which means we'll bring two of these into one and twist it again to make to make a yard how much I'll show you in a minute [Applause] that's amazing yeah it's a lot of fun and I've pushed the limits of this machine I will tell you because I'd like to make creative yarn I don't like the same thing all the time but I do like to make lovely yarn and so so this is a two-ply I'll tell you something this is more of a DK a little bit bigger than a sport but it was came out really nice let's see if we can get into the light here this is there's a there's some of just a standard sport weight maybe a little bit heavier than a sport weight um really soft white I'll pack a yarn so we're back here and these are some of the products that we that we produced this is a worsted weight yarn that is just super soft and fluffy this is a brown alpaca fiber so actually made the yarn we you know we put it into a skein like this but we here's another one different colors there's 21 different colors of natural alpaca fiber and there's two types of alpaca there's Surrey & micaiah so when you calculate that you have forty-two different varieties without even dyeing it but we also do a natural dyeing here and we have a class in a poisoner we do classes on natural dyeing so this is dyed with with a net oh so this is a yellow sport weight yarn that was dyed with the same thing that they used to dye cheese and then this was dyed with tumeric this is a tumeric died so we like to do natural dyeing so this is tumeric and then and then this was red onion red onion skins gives us this green color but wait we also do indigo which is a nice blue color same like blue jeans a lot of blue jeans are dyed with indigo and we we also make oh this is this is a combination this is indigo this hat we made was an indigo is the blue and yellow the yellow is a Neto so we do we do finish products as well but everything comes off of our farm that we made here so it all comes we share it ourselves and then we wait and make new yarn and then we make the product fingerless gloves this was a fun project I called this but Ripple and this is a combination of about seven different alpaca there was a lot of fun to make just like browns and blacks and all kinds of colors in there I just got a little creative that day but also the felted soap which is those seconds that talked about we use those they have a nice scrubbing ability they exfoliate and there's natural homemade soap in there and nothing with fragrances it's all natural oils we also have a line of cat toys mice little mouse with a tail and and some rattle balls and some balls that don't wear out another really cute mm-hmm now when you kept talking about dryer balls maybe educate them yeah dryer balls are fabulous they are one of our very best products they reduce your drying time by 10 to 12 minutes a load I did my testing in a smart dryer I did the load ten times and with their with each with and without so and with the balls that were ten to twelve minutes faster the dryer stops when it's done so it was it was really a great test so because I needed to know that they work and they work very well they they do everything that a dryer ball and that her dryer sheet does except without the chemicals right and they save your dryer because you're drying less time with your dryer and so just and you can sent them with the essential oils like lavender or lemon and so there's everything a dryer she does without the chemicals so these are one of our you do want to use three to a load because the way that they work is they push your laundry open and that's how it helps aerate it and let your dryer work better so that's that's why you need three or more many people that use variables are using at least three maybe four or five or six they last about five or six years apakah dryerballs it's a very strong fiber that's I mean look how much you'd say you know yes and those nasty drivers do yeah that's very good investment they are they're great they're one of our top sellers and we love those and the birds of death model yeah and the birds the bird nest these the the birds will come and what we would cut open the ends here and then the birds can come and take the fiber out and build their nests so it keeps little baby birds nice and warm you want to put these out in February because those birds come back really early it's still really cold when they return but they got to build that nest for the babies so this is a really good thing it attracts the birds without attracting the squirrels and so that's another use of and I'm really loving how you did with the turmeric and then those onions I mean this is just totally cool and we're growing pokeberry right now which I'm harvesting for our October 29th sign class yeah one day oh we have so much in our house oh yeah you need any extra oh yeah I can use it I've got my I'm employed my niece's to go around the farm and harvest the rice yeah we have tons along yeah Oh crazy yeah so we can always use more I love that color oh yeah alright so here we are with the alpacas and you'll notice in the background we have chickens and we've got goats this is Mara she's extra friendly yeah he's a sweetheart and she's gonna run off but yeah every animal on my farm centers around alpaca and what I've learned over the years is that there are certain threats to alpaca that and I wanted to help reduce those so we added fainting goats there Tennessee fainting goats and they run you know here around the property and with the alpaca if we were to get a domestic dog number one killer about PACA here in the is domestic dog and so if we were to get a dog to come on the property the goats would be a likely target and they would ever would have run bunch of fainting goats would faint and so they would fall over and then the alpacas can run to safety in there and the goats goats are much tougher than alpaca I'm gonna tell you right now they go goats might survive a dog attack the alpaca will not so that's a that's why I have them as a protection layer for the alpaca I also have chickens and ducks chickens and chickens go through the manure and they eat you know worms and parasites that might reproduce and cow and the Ducks about the chickens either you know go through the manure but the Ducks actually will eat slugs and snails vineyard use these to protect their grapes but I use them to protect the alpaca from a disease called my ninja worm which is a spinal or a worm that that that infects it's infects all the deer here in Missouri so deer will will will drop this and this slugs and snails will carry it and then walk over grass or whatever the alpaca might eat and then they'll it'll impact the alpaca and it's almost a hundred percent deadly I've had one or two cases over the years and that have actually survived but it's pretty rare and I haven't had any cases since I've been running the Ducks it's about thirty ducks that I run and it helps me to reduce the medication even though if you're a small alpaca farmer I still advocate medication on your perch because that will come in it as well but I just figure anything I can do to prevent that is good well in the summer in the fall I paint horses but I really started with horses because there is a particular parasite that is you know really deadly for alpaca it's a barber pole parasite and it affects the Apple make some their alpacas and goats and ruminants goats and a packet can both carry this so if you're running goats and I'll pack it together you really want to firm them or check them for worms quite frequently but the the horses alpaca only two in one area and that area the grass will grow up and they'll be infected and the horses will eat that grass but they don't have that same stomach so they don't get this this parasite and they annihilate it so they are the number one protector for alpaca against for me anyway against this parasite this helps keep my heart healthy many alpaca owners are concerned with running horses with alpaca but normally I like to have two or three horses with every herd of alpaca this is nugget saved nugget from total starvation now he is one of my best horses time absolutely love this boy he was skinny but he got a lot better and he is very sweet and I think thankful and he's still alive alright and I'm not standing uphill I'm just happened to be the tallest guy standing on this side of the camera so guys like we talked about these alpacas you know he's a fiber guy right so like that's his main thing he looks for the crib he looks for the genetics and like our alpacas that we had that's what they did too so it was all about the fiber all about the crimp all about the genetics the papers the good bloodlines so you're explaining to us earlier when we were like walking around the place about people that maybe want to get into alpacas and maybe have like 100 or 150 alpacas because you need that many to really have enough fiber about the hierarchy of the group and about the males and how they would act so you won't touch on that for for making money yeah that's really important because you know when you breathe out package you're gonna end up with half girls and half boys and you really want to pay attention to the personality of the boys are breeding because there are some boys that are very aggressive and some boys that are really plastic and and that's what if you end up and as your if you do get into this and you and and you end up getting animals you're gonna find that some animals have been bred that are very aggressive so you're gonna want to weed those out if you heard your voice heard or they're gonna form a small group about one in nine boys will will be aggressive and you do hear different syndromes and such but this is it's just all played back to aggression and that and your boy heard you're gonna form groups and they're gonna start to harass and even become deadly for some of your other boys there's like West Side Story like again ya know Rasik party form a group and that group will run around and they'll chase whoever they want to it's a behavior thing a few things you can do you can get them immediately write them down a list and gild them immediately doesn't matter if they have good fiber it's not worth it in the long run for you I guarantee you because you will lose more animals from that small group going around and they will literally unfortunately kill each other so though you need to be very cognizant of that behavior and eliminate that behavior from your herd if you do you're gonna have a nice Placid priests peaceful boy herd but if not you're gonna have a lot of trouble so a lot of people watch the videos and you know they're they're thinking about like you know stop working for the man you know getting their own job making their own living making their own way so what we'd like to do when we interview people like you and stuff like that is to kind of talk about what you did before you did this and then since you've done this like how has it helped you like with your family life and being able to stay at home and just do something that you're passionate about that's a good point well before I was an alpaca farmer and we've had the farm in the family for a long time but it wasn't ever really it wasn't as profitable was really an important thing for me I we owned a graphics and advertising company for many many years and it was a you know just a regular you know bigger job you know we worked really hard but but we want to do I wanted to do something with animals and the farm it really allows us to do that and and we wanted some animal that was gonna be gentle to the ground and how pakka's are gentle the ground they don't you know they don't disturb the grass they they grow the grass turn the grass into fiber and the average alpaca can produce between three and six hundred dollars worth of fiber a year and so that's why we need the numbers that we need in order to be a fiber farm we need we need enough alpaca to produce enough income to live on and that's but we like to pack up because unlike cattle where we were really looking at just straight meat market with their cattle all we could do is produce cattle and we would take them up to the sale barn and Sheldon and that really wasn't producing enough income to live on whereas the alpaca they can produce the fiber or because I just feel like that that I look at them as partners for us they turn grass into fiber and I can make fiber into yarn but I can't make grass in the yarn well now the fiber is just like a gift that keeps on giving it what you were saying with the beef if you take them and you sell them you know then you just keep using them year after year after year that's right and that's a good point the average alpaca will produce ten to fifteen thousand dollars of fiber in their lifetime yeah so you say like you go to all the farmers market type things in Missouri right as many as you can and you also mention like when we were looking at that machinery because that's no joke I mean you have a couple bucks invested in that right yeah yeah we do but I mean you started off but you started off with carding table Carter's and the basic like what do they call a cottage industry type equipment right the spinner the Carter and all that stuff we had we started off with tabletop Carter's and and a drum Carter that we did about one ounce of the time way and and that was really effective and I still and we went to the alpaca we went to the farmers markets who Emily solar products there and that's and that's really how we we developed a clientele hopefully you guys enjoyed this video you know we showed you the whole place we gave you the operations from the alpaca to the fiber to the machines in products and this guy is doing the thing I mean we know him and he's really in there so like one of the things with Stacy myself when we had out Pacus we did a lot of the shearing and everything else but we actually gave him all of our bags about pack of fiber as well because you know when you get to that end process you know they're like he was talking about you have to go to like a co-op and then we call them we got some information about that but it really seemed kind of like a hassle so if you can actually set up a system like he has it's it's much better for your whole operation and then you can see profits faster you know on your homestead so hopefully you guys enjoyed this video again all of his information is down below alpacas of Troy don't forget to check us out on Facebook Instagram and Twitter we'll see you guys on the next video hey guys hey guys thanks for watching our video you might want to check out these videos and if you want to become a homestead homey click the picture of us below we will see you tomorrow

Channel: OFF GRID with DOUG & STACY

Views: 121,456

Keywords: Off Grid with Doug and Stacy, Doug and Stacy, Doug, Stacy, Off Grid, off the grid, off the grid living, off the grid homes, off grid living, off grid cabin, off grid with Doug and Stacy, off grid solar power system, off grid house, off grid homestead, off grid solar, homestead, homesteading, homesteading for beginners, homesteading off the grid, natural food recipes, holistic health, holistic living, alpacas, great pyrenees, chickens, ducks, yarn

Id: oUixnkgLjQk

Length: 42min 28sec (2548 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 30 2017