It is with great pleasure to inform you that NEAFP will have a booth at the Big E and New York Extraganza this Fall. We will not be selling products but will have an information booth and products on display. For those of our customers that we have not had the opportunity to meet in person please stop by and say hello. We love meeting our customers and get a hands on idea on your experiences in the alpaca industry.

We will also be offering fiber collection and product pick up at these two shows. This is a great way for you to save on shipping and handling cutting down on your costs.

It will be important for orders to be placed two weeks prior to the show, deadline for Big E is Sept 15, 07 and New York Extravagnza deadline is October 6, 07.

This allows us plenty of time to have your orders ready and it will give us a good sense for how much fiber we will be transporting back to the mill.

A few other guidelines for dropping off fiber at the show is to please pack in clear plastic bags (no boxes) and to label each bag of fiber with:

Farm name
Contact Information
Fiber Grade

When sealing your bags of alpaca fiber please compress to remove as much air as possible. See you at the shows!

We hope next year to extend this service beyond the Northeast to other parts of the country. If you have any ideas on shows in your area we should consider do not hesitate to drop us a line.

With most of our customers relying on shipping we are looking at ways to help reduce the costs. By its nature, alpaca fiber is lofty which means if not compressed properly, it takes up a lot of space and does not have much weight. We do see some fantastic packing techniques. One of our favorites is vacuum packed plastic bags formed into nice neat locks and fit snuggly into a cardboard box. The benefit of good packing is the tighter the packing, the less expensive it is to ship. The best rate per pound from the post office is if you can pack 25-30 lbs of fiber into a 17" x 17" x 34" box.

We are also open to ideas to help farmers get their fiber to us and their finished goods returned without utilizing the postal system. Please feel free to send your feedback to us and maybe collectively we can seek cost saving alternatives.

Recently we have had several farms come to our mill to drop off fiber and pick up their products. Most were amazed at the amount of fiber we have at the mill and how our sorting and packing work. We realized this was of great interest to our customers so we have included a few photos giving all of you a glimpse into our mill.

When fiber arrives at our mill it is checked in, by this we mean it is weighed, paperwork is pulled to credit the farm that has sent the fiber, and then it is sent to the sorting tables for further sorting. The sorted fiber is then collected into the sorting boxes each representing a different grade and color. We have 16 sorting boxes on the floor at all times. A sorting box holds approximately 110 lbs of alpaca fiber. Once we have 8 to 10 boxes full of the same color and grade, we use a fiber baler to create a large bale weighing upwards of 1000 lbs. These bales are then shipped out to begin the manufacturing process.

For those of you that haven't visited the mill we hope this sheds some light on what happens to your fiber when it arrives.