Message From the President

We just finished shearing up here on our farm a couple of weekends ago. I love shearing day, despite all the weird stresses it can bring. I love watching the fiber come off the animals and seeing the small elegant creature that emerges from underneath all that fleece. It's also one of my yearly reminders of how much I love alpaca fiber itself and what a tremendous end product we have to work with.

But like most of you, we're now staring down hundreds of bags of fiber that need to be skirted and sorted and sent...somewhere. On our farm, we sell some of our fiber to local handspinners because it's great PR for our farm; we send some of our favorite fleeces to a regional mini-mill to get back as yarn or felt because I enjoy textile work; and we send the rest of it to AFCNA to help build a true North American alpaca fiber industry. I encourage every breeder to work with at least some of their fleece in order to really understand what it is that we're producing, but to work with AFCNA (or any other pool for that matter!) with the rest of it in order to build ongoing demand for what we're producing. Especially as the industry and the available fiber volume grow, true high-value commercial markets for our fiber are vital to all of our success.

AFCNA will be collecting fiber this year from those members who wish to participate. We realize that with all the ups and downs this past year not everyone will want to, but your fiber is the key asset the Co-op has to work with in order to grow a viable fiber industry and we hope you'll continue to support AFCNA with your fiber, even this year.

The biggest change is that we won't be having you ship it to Sonora this year. Yet another alpaca industry saga in a year full of them it seems. The short version though is that we'd received enough complaints from both members and from processors to whom we'd sold fiber about the quality and timeliness of the sort there that we needed to find a new option for us. Sonora wasn't terribly interested in investing in more training or altering their process, so we've been working over the past several months to find a new alternative that would allow the Co-op to have more control and would allow us to grow as the volume of fiber available grows. We're in the process of finalizing an agreement with Tapetes de Lana in New Mexico that I think will serve us well in the years to come. Tapetes de Lana is a non-profit organization designed to promote cottage industry and rural lifestyles, so an additional benefit is that in coordination with them, AFCNA has been able to seek Federal and state-level funding for setting up a new sorting location and the training involved. It's my hope that this will be a model that we can build on to move to a more regional collection system in the years to come.

The upshot of all of that is that most of you didn't receive a 2004 accounting of your fiber because we stopped the sort last year to assess our options. I'd truly hoped that we could just restart it at Sonora to close out the 2004 year, but the costs were higher than we'd previously paid with no guarantees of an improvement in quality and speed, which we couldn't afford as we promote and market your fiber to manufacturers. So we'll sort the 2004 fiber at our new collection point. If you sent your 2004 fiber dry and in good condition, it will have been safe in storage and will be accounted for with this year's sort. I know that's disappointing news for some of you, but the Co-op is growing and changing and some of these issues take more time to resolve than others.

This is where I make my ongoing appeal to all of you though, not for your support and patience, but for your backs and minds. If you have a passion for helping build a North American alpaca fiber industry or feel you could do something better (I hear you muttering out there!), we have so many opportunities we could be pursuing as an industry--if we had the man and woman power. You've already joined the Co-op and have been sending us your fiber, jump in the rest of the way and contribute some of your talents and energy too so that we can really make the Co-op successful. We'll put them to good use, to the benefit of us all.

Kara Heinrichs
President, AFCNA Board of Directors