A typical day in our previous life: Drive to work in never ending traffic; spend the day working on various album projects (not always as glamorous as it sounds) dealing with demanding record companies; leave studio around 7pm (if we were lucky to get out that early) and drive another half hour or more home; get home, rush to make dinner, then time to start the fun all over again.
One day after this typical routine, Steve asks, “Are we having fun yet?” to which I immediately answer “NO!” That was the turning point for us, and realizing that as much as we enjoyed our business of running a major mastering studio on the West Coast for 20+ years, we realized we weren’t enjoying life as we had no life outside of running the studio.
I spotted a cute teddy bear face in an Ad on the back of Sunset Magazine. Went online and found it was an Alpaca and there was an upcoming event that I managed to beg Steve to go to. “It’ll be fun. We’ll take a nice drive out to Solvang, drop by to see what it’s all about.” We were intrigued, but wondered how we could incorporate these incredible animals into our hectic lifestyle.
Fast forward 10 years later…
With today’s technological advances happening at warp speed, we decided to make the big leap and leave California. We found a beautiful 40 acre property in the hills of McMinnville, Oregon, and that’s where we decided to split our time between our mastering studio Future Disc and raising Alpacas at the BuzznHum Ranch.
We didn’t have a clue about livestock when we started 3 years ago with 5 females. We now have a herd of 20 Suris and Huacayas and growing, with quite a bit of experience under our belt. We feel that it’s of the utmost importance to raise Alpacas according to the highest standards. In Suris, confirmation, luster, density, and in Huacayas, confirmation, fineness, density. Our goal is to produce the finest Suri & Huacaya bloodlines lines possible.
In our quest to find these lines we have been fortunate to meet some exceptional people in the industry that have truly helped us along the way. Jude and Al at Pucara Int’l have become our mentors as well as great friends. When we started looking into buying some animals, they would take us down to the barn and show us a few. Being totally naive about what we where looking for, we asked them to make some recommendations on a few animals that might give us the ability to attend some shows. As it turned out, they got us into some of their best bloodlines and our show results say a lot about their integrity and honesty. They have spent countless hours with us, letting us work on their ranch, taken us to various shows, and taught us everything we needed to know and then some. There is no one in the industry that we would trust as much with our herd decisions. We would highly recommend them to anyone looking to get started in the alpaca industry, looking for some animals for their herd, or who would like to get their breeding program up to speed. .
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