We are Kristin and Larry Hopkins. Our farm is in
far northern Wisconsin. You get on old Highway 51 in New Orleans and keep
driving north through the Midwest and north central states until you run out of
highway. Then you turn left and go another 3-1/2 miles. One more turn north toward
Lake Superior and there we are! (This is in case anyone wants to go out for a
little drive and drop in.) You can turn right when you step out our back door
and head north again and there is nothing between us and Lake Superior for the
next 10 miles but one county highway, a river and couple of logging roads.
And a lot of trees and rocks and deer, bear, wolves, foxes, coyotes, and other
indigenous flora and fauna. We haven't trekked the llamas all the way to the
lake yet because the river is usually too deep to cross and the undergrowth and forest
are too heavy to get through without trails.
We aren't farmers by birth, but by choice. Larry
was in the Navy thirty some years ago when we got married, and we spent the next
several years moving around the country and abroad. We loved living abroad, but
I sure hated all the moving! So after he got out of the Navy and went to grad
school and I finished school, we decided that what we really wanted to do was
move out into the country somewhere and be unable to see anybody else's house
from our windows.
So here we are, more
than twenty five years later, on an old Finnish farmstead, in a teeny tiny house
with one closet. (We keep planning to remodel, but we always seem to remodel the
barn or build a new one instead!) We have ten llamas, a small herd of Shetland
sheep, and
one old retired Saanen dairy goat, great-great granddaughter of our first
permanent Grand Champion. We retired from successfully raising, milking,
and showing Saanens after over twenty years, under the herd name ELEMENTS FARM.
We also have Dorset and Dorset/Suffolk x
sheep- a real mixed bag of a sheep herd, as we raise sheep both for lamb sales
and their fleeces. Our flock includes a couple of Merino x Polypay ewes with
gorgeous fleeces, two East Friesian/Rideau-Arcott/Polypay ewes, who
have luscious fleeces and entertaining personalities and several Dorset/Est-a-Laine
Merino crosses. Our funniest ewe is
Priscilla, a Jacob/Dorset cross. She has a Hershey chocolate fleece, with white
bracelets on her ankles and enough white spots on her to make her a cull in a
commercial herd, but a dream for a handspinner. Five years ago we added our
small flock of Shetlands. These knee high sheep are a real delight.
Ours are pretty highly socialized, so owning them is a bit like having puppies
with hooves. They wag their tails when petted or given treats (animal
crackers are a big favorite, as are carrots, graham crackers, unshelled peanuts, and apple slices)
and often lean against us to have their chins scratched.
It had been my dream to have llamas ever since I
saw my first llama as a child visiting the Brooklyn Zoo. My school and our Navy
and then more school years took us away from the animal dream for quite a while
and when we first began the farm, llamas were so far out of our price range that
they truly seemed like an impossible dream. In the last 10 years, the market has
opened up a lot, undoubtedly to the dismay of breeders who paid tens of
thousands of dollars for a single animal, but much to the delight of us "average"
homesteaders.
We bought our first two
llamas as guardian
llamas almost 10 years ago because our Great Pyrenees LGD (Livestock Guardian Dog) had died
and we had read that llamas make great sheep and goat guardians. We have
learned a lot since those days, but still retain geldings and some females in
guardian positions. We now have another Great Pyrenees, Tia, who works in
tandem with Thunder, the guardian llama, to protect the sheep from the wolves
and coyotes which wander the property to the north and east of the farm.
They make a great team. Thunder is highly observant and if he notices
something is not quite right, Tia will hare off in the direction Thunder is
staring or alarming, to check out the situation and see if it needs her canine
attention. Llamas are like peanuts (well, maybe a tad more expensive!); it's hard to
have just two without wanting more. So we now have 10 of our own and will keep a
few more females as we sell trained geldings or trained gelding quality males.
We do offer a few females, open or bred, some with a cria at the side, very few
stud quality males, and of course wonderful companion llamas.
We keep a closed herd due to the fact that there
are a number of ruminant diseases that we either never had and don't wish to add
or have eradicated from the herd. We have a CAE/OPP and CL free herd and are
part of the Volunteer Scrapie Program. We test
regularly for these, as well as for Johne's disease. We do offer stud
service, but your ewes must be tested and part of the Scrapie Program as well to
breed here or to lease a ram. We do offer for sale a few fine stud quality
rams each season.
OK, so I cheated. So she's not a llama or a sheep or a goat! But she is still pretty darn cute, isn't she? Meet Sukey, our Brussels Griffon crossbred bed dog. She has a tough job, but she's up to it!
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