Fiberguild

Protecting the livestock can be a real problem, but is a basic responsibility of the farm owner

Good farm fences are the first line of defense.

But, they aren’t perfect. Thus, I have struggled with the issue of firearms. We have neighbors within about 300 yards, so the choice of weapon was a bit of a struggle. After studying ballistics, and considering the most likely predators (dogs, coyotes, and a rare possibility of a cougar) I finally made the choice.

Here are some basic ballistics of common choices:

Considering the predators, the ranges in question, and the fact that my wife could well be using the weapon, the choices were fairly easy.

We are using a Ruger 10/22 and a Marlin .357 magnum lever action carbine (with 158 grain solid points).  The Marlin should be sufficient to bring down any predator we will see out to 150 yards or so.  Neither weapon will carry to the neighbors under normal circumstances.

The side benefit of the Marlin is being able to use the same ammunition in a Ruger GP100 revolver.

Project Honey Pot is a collaborative effort to stop spam.  From their website:

Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website. Using the Project Honey Pot system you can install addresses that are custom-tagged to the time and IP address of a visitor to your site. If one of these addresses begins receiving email we not only can tell that the messages are spam, but also the exact moment when the address was harvested and the IP address that gathered it.

Many folks don’t know that there are malicious programs that do nothing but traverse the Internet “harvesting” email addresses.  Project Honey Pot allows site owners to easily set up a trap to identify these.  I highly recommend all site owners to join the effort.

Does it work?  Yep!  Today I received the following email:

Regardless of how the rest of your day goes, here’s something to be happy about — today a honey pot you installed successfully identified a previously unknown email harvester (IP: 190.19.79.146). The harvester was caught by your honey pot installed at:

www.gatewayalpacas.com

You can find information about your newly identified harvester here:

http://www.projecthoneypot.org/i_51efbe818834aa71c797e2354418b925

Info on all the harvesters that have been spotted by this honey pot is also available here:

http://www.projecthoneypot.org/t_51319.1dd0a

Don’t forget to tell your friends you made the Internet a little better today….

Thanks from the entire Project Honey Pot team and, we’re sure if they knew, from the Internet community as a whole.

It is nice to help make the world a little bit better…

I was privileged to have been invited to Kinney Valley Alpacas in Ontario, WI to talk about the alpaca fiber industry here in the US. Just got home late last night (Gawd, all joy has been taken out of flying anymore. Take the train whenever possible!!)

It was a great group of folks in attendance, involved, attentive and with hard hitting questions.

A couple of things really stood out to me.

First, I sense real motivation for the transition of alpacas from a speculative “rare breed” industry into main stream agriculture. This was evident on many levels, not the least of which was open discussion of the development of a consumption and hide market.

Secondly, there were a few members of the Alpaca Fiber Cooperative of North America present. There is (and it is probably cultural, as much as anything) a real lack of “ownership” of the co-op. Folks consistently talked about “the” co-op.

I suggested that a simple change in language could bring a huge change in attitude and performance. Instead of referring to “the” co-op, far better to talk about “our” co-op. It is, after all, our business, totally owned and operated by alpaca fiber producers.

I want to thank the Radloff family for inviting me to speak at their farm event. It was a great time and a wonderful opportunity.

We have been raising alpacas for over a decade now.  These are by far the easiest livestock we have dealt with.

Two steers run last summer and turned into locker beef in the fall did more damage to fences and buildings that 20 alpacas have in a decade!

The downturn in the economy has had a major impact on the prices of alpacas.  I suspect that much of the market was being financed with home equity, and that tap is pretty dry these days with property values working their ways back down to something approaching reason.

It will be interested to see how the market holds once the economy does begin improving.  While I secretly hope that we can gradually move into a production, rather than speculative, market model, the specualtive market is far more lucrative (if not as sustainable).