RE: [AlpacaTalk] Re: Let them eat cake.
In all this large farm/small farm bickering one thing that seems to be lost
is a basic principle I've seen time and time again to be true. It is
usually expressed with phrases like, "A rising tide floats all boats."
When a big farm or advertising coop runs big national ads it benefits them,
but it also raises the demand for alpacas nationally. Some of that demand
ends up at farms that were not part of the coop. This can be seen, for
example, when McDonalds runs a big advertising campaign, sales at many
restaurants goes up, because while McDonalds was intending to sell their
product, they actually prompted people to go eat out (even if it wasn't at
McDonalds). When ILA runs a big campaign, it raises peoples' interest in
alpacas, and if your local advertising has worked to let people know you
have alpacas for sale, some of that demand will turn to you because you are
easier to get to than the nearest ILA farm.
I don't have megabucks. We have 17 alpacas. We just started 5 years ago,
and we didn't have a plan to get big. But the successes we've seen were the
direct result of letting local people know we have alpacas, we provide
mentoring, and we welcome visitors whether they bring their checkbook or
not. (For what it's worth, no one has ever come to us because they saw us
at an alpaca show or they cared one hoot about the ribbons we've won.)
Ok, I digress to shows. I have a lovely fiber boy that has a blue and a
red ribbon to his name. I'm up front about it - he won the blue by taking
first in a class of 1 (from a judge who had previously sold us another fiber
boy by telling us he was a junior herdsire), and he got his red by taking
second in a class of 2. Some people might market him as an award winning
animal. We had him fixed and he is for sale as a very beautiful fiber/PR
boy (very friendly). Show ribbons don't mean diddly-squat because it is all
relative to the competition. Every animal needs to be evaluated on an
absolute scale that indicates where they fit in the population. (For what
it's worth, we only took the fiber boy to the shows as a companion to our
award winning herdsire, and showing him in what we knew would be tiny
classes just makes the wall in our farm store look more interesting.
Don Stanwyck
Carnation, WA
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posted by Chaddo at 2:52 PM
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