Part 2 - As Time Goes By...

We moved our three horses onto the property. My wife was in negotiation with a farm in Georgia to purchase and young Colt by the name of Two-Tone Chek. A "Medicine Hat" Paint horse to be our stallion that we would offer breeding to.

At one point during our time as a horse farm, we had four stallions on property that we offered for breeding. Amy at the time was also buying and selling horses with another farm in Scotland, CT.  The horse business paid the bills for a while but like any business, there are ups and downs.  It got to a point where people were giving away horses because they could not afford to feed them. We were constantly offered free horses.  At one point, we had around 20 horses on property between the stallions, mares and babies.  We boarded a couple Paso Fino's for a friend of ours. As the horse market began to tumble, we looked at other livestock in order to diversify. 

At that time, Alpacas began to become more affordable to the small farm.  In their early years, Alpacas were only affordable by the very wealthy.  A big plus to these animals were the tax advantages.  Somehow the powers that be were able to get a dollar for dollar write off on your taxes for Alpacas since they were new to the market and this was a way to promote them. 

We dove head first into the alpaca business and did very well. After a few years into raising and selling alpacas. Once a year we would have our animals sheered (shaved) and the good quality "fiber" would be sent out to make yarn.  There was also a small market for rug yarn where you would use your lesser quality fiber. We noticed that there was always a long wait from when you send out your raw fiber to when you actually got your finished yarn back.  Most Alpaca farms would have a small shop on their farm where they would sell their products.

I asked Amy how the mills do that process the fiber and if it might be a good business to look into. Less than a year later, we got the opportunity to purchase a used carding mill along with a picker and a rug yarn maker.  There are several other mill machines that you would have to add to this list in order to make regular yarn for clothing.  Since we only had enough money to buy those three machines, we decided to go into the Alpaca rug yarn business.  This turned out to be a good business.  Most mill owners did not want to produce rug yarn over clothing yarn.  At the time, a mill would charge around $26 a pound to process fiber for clothing yarn.  Rug yarn was only going for around $14 a pound.  So, to a mill owner that invested in the whole lot of machines to produce clothing yarn, it did not make sense to process much of the cheaper yarn.  For Amy and I, we only had the three machines that were paid for. Most mill owners had loans on their equipment. 

Once we started promoting our rug yarn mill, it took off. Every day we would get orders in.  The UPS and FedEx truck would be at our house constantly. This proved to be a pretty lucrative business to run out of our barn. Especially when Amy got sick and would not have been able to work. We had three employees with 2 shifts running the mill. Upcoming Post…Spinning Yarn.

-wf