The Studmaster Fleece Report

By Mike Safley

I attended the 2004 AOBA/ARI Fiber to Fashion convention in Reno, Nevada. The curriculum allowed attendees to explore the alpaca fiber commercialization process. The speakers included the internationally recognized experts such as Louis Chavez of Peru and Angus McColl who was originally from Scotland and more recently of Yokum and McColl Testing Laboratories of Denver, Colorado.

I have worked extensively with Angus McColl over the years. In 1992, he helped alpaca breeders to begin testing their alpaca fleeces for micron count, standard deviation and co-efficient of variation. This test is in universal use today.

As the president of ARI, I retained Yokum and McColl Laboratories to test all the imported alpacas that were screened beginning in 1994. We set fiber standards that were an important part of the basis for admitting previously unregistered alpacas into the alpaca registry. Angus had the following comment about those standards, during his lecture in Reno, “The ARI fleece standards that we used to screen the imports were primarily responsible for insuring that the best of the available animals in South America were imported into the United States.” More recently I have worked with Angus to develop a new fleece report that we call the Studmaster™ Report. This measures ten separate values: Mean Fiber Diameter (MFD), Standard Deviation (SD), Co-efficient of Variation (C of V) of Fiber Diameter, Spin Fineness, Fibers greater than 30 microns, Mean Staple Length (MSL), Length Standard Deviation (LSD), Co-efficient of Variation of Staple Length, Curvature, and Medullation (on light colored fleeces.)

All of these measurements will eventually be analyzed using Best Linear Unbiased Prediction(BLUP) to establish Estimated Progeny Differences(EPDs) for every sire, dam and cria in the Studmaster™ Program. Each measurement will be taken on the Optical Fiber Diameter Analyzer 100 (OFDA 100).

We chose the OFDA 100 testing equipment because it offers the widest range of scientifically accurate tests. Over the past year several new testing services have become available, utilizing the OFDA 2000 equipment. This machine was developed to field test fleece in the Australian sheep shearing sheds. It tests fleece samples that have not been washed or re-humidified and it tests a very small sample in five millimeter intervals along the length of the same staple. This test is not recognized by the International Wool Testing Laboratory (I.W.T.D.) or American Society for Testing and Measurement (ASTM). In other words it is not sufficiently accurate to use in a genetic improvement program that seeks to establish EPDs. (For a full report on the various testing methods see Methods for Measuring Microns by Angus McColl.)

For more information on this subject see:

Methods for Measuring Microns
Studmaster™ Males
What are EPDs?
Micron Madness

Reproduced with permission from:

Alpaca Breeding Farm: Northwest Alpacas: raising suri and huacaya alpacas for sale, alpaca investment, and alpaca business plans for alpaca breeders and owners worldwide. Find more useful information at the Alpaca Library.