Dave and Barbara Davies recently opened up their family alpaca farm, A Simpler Time, and hosted public tours of their mill and behind-the-scenes operations of the facility.
During one tour Barbara Davies didn’t mention that her entire house burned down in the 2003 Cedar Fire. She smiled at the youngest girl in the tour group and shook a container of food to summon a herd of alpaca and start the tour, then introduced them as the visiting children greeted the exotic animals for the first time.
While the alpacas munched through their introduction, Barbara Davies explained that neither she nor her husband (then a distribution manager with Qualcomm) had any plans to raise alpacas for a living. They were on vacation in Colorado in 2000 when they stumbled across a ranch that offered tours.
“We were just enthralled with the beauty of these animals. We bought four alpacas that week and two years later, we went full-time with a fiber mill,” Davies said.
Breeding and raising the alpacas is an unsteady business, according to Barbara— the couple sold 19 alpacas in one year and five in a subsequent year— but she focuses on the process of introducing newborn alpacas to the world rather than the number of animals that are sold.
When babies are born, Barbara initially puts mother and baby in isolation for some private time, then reintroduces the baby to the herd the next day. She explains how the entire group rushes over each time a new baby is introduced, each one wanting to check out the new addition.
According to Barbara, she and her husband try to hold regular open houses to share their love of the animals with the public, in addition to having their site utilized for private events. She laughs and says their alpacas are well-traveled, frequent participants at corporate and private events; recently, they made their appearance at a VIP Padres event.
“I have noticed in the past year or so that we have more and more people contacting us for private events… We even had a proposal here and they ended up inviting us to the wedding,” Barbara Davies said.
The final stop of the open house and tour is in the small store that the couple operates. Dave Davies uses skeins and cones of alpaca yarn to explain the difference between single-ply and double-ply yarn. He has the children touch the woven wall-hanging so they can feel the thick texture of the yarn that was used, then compares that to a softly woven sweater.
