Singing the praises of the AAFT

Firstly - apologies for no photos but I haven't had time to take one yet as I got a bit over excited when I popped home to check my email - and apologies to my non alpaca owning readers as this might all be a bit boring - back to normal drivel tomorrow!

Yesterday I packed up another batch of fibre samples and decided to try sending them to AAFT for testing.  I posted them first class yesterday and the results were in my inbox this afternoon!  How is that for efficiency!  Wonderful service and very, very reasonable price.  But, that is not all, they are very detailed and come with notes to help analyse them.  Now I may be making a complete idiot of myself here as I have not read all the notes yet or studied all the information properly but it appears  that using the graphs they send which shows the distance from the tip of the fibre plotted against the micron you could see  how your feeding regime or even individual paddocks they are in is effecting the fibre.   Experimenting is about to begin and I am going to number each paddock and write down which paddock they are all in over the next year and how much feed they get to use with next year fibre samples.  Each sheet gives lots of information which I have not had before so a massive thank you to Liz Barlow at the AAFT.

And I am pleased with the results - although I haven't looked properly so I may again be sounding foolish.

My beautiful suri, Lily, despite having had two cria and being heavily pregnant with the third came in at 19.6 micron.  Her son, Yossarian came in at 16.9 micron with 28.1% below 15 microns which sounds good to me.  He has a C.  Haut of 84.1mm but as I don't understand that bit yet that could be a good or bad thing!  Then Alf, the suri we used last year once to see how he did, at almost 3 years I am pleased with him at 17.4 micron - glad we tried him out and hope he managed it with Sherbert!  Then, before I bore you all to tears, Greeves.  He had a very low micron last year which we felt must be partly down to his illnesses (wish I had these graphs on him then).  He is now getting on for two and his micron is now 16.1 with the minimum micron being 15.5 and maximum 17.3 - - no good, I could go on forever and I can see your eyes glazing over!!

AAFT - Australian Alpaca Fibre Testing - really good information and a speedy service.