Yaks

My name is Kent Sutton. I'm the famous yak farmer in Archer, Idaho. It's a beautiful spot, as you can see, and it's a great place to raise yaks. I started with five yaks about 15 years ago and I've really enjoyed them. They're very unique. Special animal. I've always liked animals and things a little exotic. My wife, bless her heart, she's wanted to always do sustainability live. So we grow all of our own food and we raise pigs and chickens and we really need to get a cow. And then I thought, Oh, I kind of dragged my feet on the cow because, you know, cows are pretty boring. Everybody has cows. And one of my favorite movies is the Brad Pitt Seven Years in Tibet. And if you watch that, you know, The Yak show up all through the movie and the beautiful landscape and researched them a little more, found some up in northern Idaho, was the closest ones I could find and brought five of them down that were bred and just kind of started my own herd a few years ago. The biggest problem with the yaks is they come from the Himalaya mountains, you know, from 10,000ft altitude cold. So the outside of their carcass has a thick layer of fat. And as you can see, they're covered with on top of that fat with a lot of hair and wool. Speaker1: So summer is a problem to keep them comfortable. So as you see, we kind of got little bits of cool water, a lot of trees, places they can get to, to kind of escape the heat. Their coat is a combination of hair and wool. The and you can kind of see the wool kind of shedding off some of the animals and it can be spun into a very high quality yarn. So so you got a cloth material and then the meat is incredibly healthy. And of course they produce also the milk. So it is kind of a multi-purpose animal. So the goats from a neighbor, there used to be two goats and the one goat got hit and then this goat didn't like being by itself. And so it decided join the yak hard and we can't get it out. And the yak herd can't get it out and the owners can't get it out. So after a couple, a couple of months, we all gave up and just let it, you know, let it be part of the acts. So when kids learn to read the letter Y is represented by the yaks. And as you look at a yak, you can kind of see, you know, their face makes a Y with the horns and down to the pointed chin. Speaker1: A lot of kids come from backgrounds without any agriculture, and it's a real pleasure to have them come to, you know, this kind of show them what where their food comes from. Yeah, they look a little sleepy, dopey, but boy, they got a pretty fast twitch. They can go up to 40 miles an hour. Like I think what people are confused about is they don't seem to see any great utility in the animal because, you know, it kind of takes the place of a sheep or a cow. But but I think just the I don't know, the incredible diversity that the world has in the animal kingdom. And we get so focused in especially in agriculture and just 1 or 2 segments of everything that's out there. I think it's really important that we look and see what else the world has to offer, both, you know, the source of our food source, but also just the source of our enjoyment. And I think sometimes we we get so caught up in large scale agriculture and producing and measuring and this and that. Sometimes we kind of miss the beauty of just the living things. And, and that's, I think, what I really enjoy about the X.