New Mexican pasture woes

[Paulette Kaskinen]

So I love the idea of grooming the pasture, rather than the camelids, but so far the native fauna is definitely getting the better of me. I could spend all day raking up the bits of tumbleweed and stuff in the pasture, but as soon as a breeze blows, which is does most of the time here, along comes a whole new flock of the buggers from the neighbors' pasture. Bob and Woody aren't faring so badly, but Pablo typically wears what seems like half the pasture on his fleece. The only thing I've thought of is to dig a dustbowl for them to roll in, which I'm doing, but I wondered if anyone has any other suggestions for minimizing the amount of debris my poor llama picks up. Of course he's still incredibly handsome, but...

Thanks from all of us!@

Paulette, Bob, Woody, and Pablo

[Marty McGee Bennett]

good idea. Create the best darn dust bowl in the world and hopefully they will use it! They are creatures of habit, if you watch where they tend to roll now and make the "perfect" dustbowl where they are already rolling your chances are better that they will adopt it as "the" one. Our critters like to roll in one or two that they have made and we just let them have those areas for rolling. Seems to work pretty good. Remember that deep grooming only opens the fleece for deeper contamination so just content yourself with surface grooming if you have to groom Pablo and don't do any grooming at all on the alpacas.

[slhardy]

Hi! I'm not sure if flies are a summer problem for you down there, but with all the cows, buffalo and other livestock around my pasture, we are "honored" by the presence of flies during the summer here, in N. Utah. To help combat this problem, I sprinkle fly powder in the 2 dust bowls my critters have created in our pasture, and it really seems to help. I tried masks, and they spent more time of the ground than on their heads!

[Paulette Kaskinen]

Actually, last summer, before I had the camelids, we had gobs of flies around here - putting the powder in the dustbowl sounds like a great idea!

Thanks!

[Alpacawoman09]

Hi, we live in New Mexico as well. We had all kinds of tumbleweeds rolling through our property before we put up our 5-foot perimeter and pasture fencing. It traps all the tumblers outside. The ones that grew on the pastures, I spent several days pulling out with the roots. They have not reappeared...

Rose
Berlanta Alpacas