Cabin View prepares for annual holiday open house

This Saturday, just in time for the holiday season, Cabin View Alpaca Farm is offering a respite for cabin fever.

The Trumansburg farm is holding its 11th annual holiday open house. Guests can sip hot chocolate, watch demonstrations and (weather permitting) mingle with alpacas. The farm store is also stocked with goods made from alpaca fleece including socks, scarves, mittens and sweaters, which make great gifts.

After a most unusual year, co-owner Chris Houseworth is looking forward to the tradition.

“It’s a great family event,” Houseworth said. “The alpacas seem to know when kids are around, and they’re very friendly. It’s a good educational experience for kids.”

Houseworth has run the business with her husband, David, and daughter, Robin, for the past 11 years. The farm brings in most of its income from breeding, selling animals to other farms or charging farmers to breed animals with their award-winning stock.

In a normal year, Houseworth would have spent time showing her best alpacas at competitions all over the Northeast, but most were canceled due to COVID-19. Shows are a big part of marketing in the alpaca breeding business. Ribbons increase the value of the animals and expose a farm to new buyers. She said that sales for breeding animals are down this year, but her sales to hobby farms are actually up.

Hobby farms usually raise the animals for their hair, called fleece or fiber. It is extremely warm and soft, wicks moisture and is odor resistant. And alpaca products do not contain lanolin, the substance that can cause some people to have an allergic reaction to sheep’s wool.

“It seems people have adapted to a different lifestyle in a lot of ways,” Houseworth said about 2020. “The pandemic has made people stop and sit back and say ‘What can I do to change my lifestyle?’”

One person who knows and loves the alpaca-raising lifestyle is fellow T-burger Nikki Addicott. After driving by the alpaca farm for years, she decided to stop one day, five years ago. She was hooked after the initial tour and has since become a fixture at the farm, starting out as a volunteer and progressing to owning three of her own animals that she boards at the farm.

“I’m from a farming family, but didn’t think I’d ever be interested in doing it myself,” Addicott said. “But it just resonated with me. At first, it was just taking care of the animals and learning the husbandry, but it also really feeds my creative side. I’ve always liked doing crafts, and there are a lot of different avenues for using the fleece.”

She now helps with feeding, cleaning and administering vaccines and makes her own fiber creations to sell in the farm store. Because Cabin View is so close to the Cayuga Lake Wine Trail, sales at the farm store have continuously risen over the years.

Addicott takes fiber that isn’t quite as soft as the rest (from the neck and legs) and turns it into dryer balls, felted soaps and throw rugs. She also spends time at other local farms to learn everything she can about fiber production.

Both Addicott and Houseworth said that they complement each other’s strengths and weaknesses, making for an excellent partnership and friendship.

“Chris is an amazing businesswoman,” Addicott said. “She’s very smart, excellent with numbers, a good researcher. I’ve learned a tremendous amount of information from her. And I bring creativity, thinking outside the box that she likes to be in as a breeder, like: What else can we do with the gift shop? Or, should we be reaching out to the community more?”

Though she works a full-time job off the farm, Addicott has made a name for herself in the fiber world. She was recently elected to the Board of the Empire Alpaca Association, a regional not-for-profit that promotes the young industry, which only began in the U.S. in 1984.

Houseworth also worked off the farm up until two years ago. She was the co-owner of an electronic manufacturing business in Ithaca, BSU Inc. But like Addicott, getting into farming was more like going back to her roots.

“I grew up on a black Angus farm,” Houseworth said. “As a teenager graduating high school, I couldn’t wait to get off the farm but have since come full circle. I’m almost sorry that I didn’t start this 10 years earlier than I did.”

It seems almost like fate that she ended up raising alpacas on Cayuga Lake. The land her 30-acre farm sits on has been in Houseworth’s family for about 200 years. It was part of a Revolutionary War land grant with lake and road frontage.

“My father’s family raised sheep and grapes,” Houseworth said. “I find it interesting that now we raise a fleece animal and we’re on the wine trail — another full-circle moment.”

Houseworth said that she started the business with three animals and now has 50, including 12 new babies born in 2020. She said that in 2021, she hopes to get all the new animals halter trained and into shows.

“Agritourism is an industry that seems to be growing,” Houseworth said. “But it’s so difficult to know what the economy is going to do and whether people are going to want to grow their herds. We just want to be sustainable and keep the farm going, stay out here and work and be healthy.”

The open house is Dec. 12 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 9435 Congress St. Ext., Trumansburg.