After months of quietly but persistently pestering Mike and Julie Delaney of Irish Meadows Alpacas, we finally got them to agree to sell us half of their amazing 27x Champion (including 9 Judges’ Choice awards) Herdsire, Irish Meadows’ Elite Max late last year! We first got an up close look at Elite Max when Bataclan and Ian had the good/ill fortune (all about perspective) of standing next to him in the yearling class at the 2018 Futurity, one of his many aforementioned Championships. Needless to say, we knew almost instantly upon seeing the judge open his fleece, that he was and is one super-special alpaca! Perhaps most importantly from our perspective looking at the big picture, is the simple fact that Elite Max is distantly enough related to the primary genetic lines in our breeding program that he could be bred, at least on paper, to any of the females in our herd. You’ll notice I never said *unrelated*. The greater US domestic herd is suffering from an acute paucity of unrelated elite-caliber white Herdsires, and for our part we simply will not breed to what we consider lesser-quality males just because they have new or different names in their pedigrees. There has been far too much blood, sweat, and tears (oh, and money!) expended to compromise on such a thing 22 years into this enterprise of ours. Consequently, our search criteria for what we will either buy or breed our animals to and with is pretty exacting. So though Elite Max as a 6Peruvian Accoyo Elite grandson does share some genetics with the Elixir/Elite Legend/Matrix Majesty lines, which together have been the primary driver of many of our recent successes, his relation to all of them is distant enough, that we can confidently breed him into all three of those lines and their crosses. In short, we think we’ve found one heck of a kick-ass puzzle piece. The names in his pedigree are kind of like a who's who of heavy hitters: Bueno, Hemingway, Honeybelle (don't forget the ladies!), and Timoteo to name just some of them. In fact it was getting to put our hands on Elite Max's dam amazing dam, Ivy's Honeysuckle, that was one of the great selling points on her son. Alpacas that hold their fleece handles still ar rhw age of 11 don't exactly grow on vines. Yes, we'd like some more of that, please! Talk is always of course rather cheap, though given the track record of the genetics behind Elite Max, we are really excited to see what he can do in our breeding program. A huge thank you to the Delaney’s for trusting us with half of their special boy! Irish Meadows’ Elite Max is scheduled to be here at CCNF in Vermont from roughly July 1st to October 1st, and will be available for limited outside stud service.