My husband and I are interested in raising alpacas for income...BUT...we know little about them...anyone know about raising them?

-- Kristean Thompson (pigalena_babe@yahoo.com), January 17, 2002

Answers

I know that a couple years ago, some friends had three of them, having paid $130,000 for the trio.

-- Shannon at Grateful Acres Animal Sanctuary (gratacres@aol.com), January 17, 2002.

I have llamas not alpacas but they are also camelid and care is basically the same. They are more docile I am told than llamas. their fleece is more valuable than llamas as well.We feed our llamas all stock and hay and worm them twice a year. They need to be sheared at least once a year. They need a place to get into. Mine do very well with my horses and donkeys. Terry

-- Terry Lipe (elipe@fidnet.com), January 17, 2002.

Llamas, emus, ostriches and now alpacas are being touted as the next great investment. Each ad that I see for alpacas "packages" more and more including financing, after the sale service, etc. I think it's only a matter of time before alpaca prices crash. Think dot.com feeding frenzy on Wall Street.

I see a lot of folks saying how great the wool is. I'm sure it's really nice compared to sheep's wool. But a lot of folks aren't making money on sheep's wool and may never because of the inroads of artificial fibers. There's places it costs more to shear the sheep than the wool's worth. That's why people are raising hair sheep.

I read another article about the history of alpacas that was in, I believe, Discovery magazine. When the Spanish invaded South America they slaughtered alpacas for meat. What they didn't realize is that the alpacas of that time had a superfine wool that put that of present day alpacas to shame. The Spanish may have wiped out that characteristic. The article mentioned an effort to find and improve those genetics.

The alpacas being sold today do not have the quality of wool that their long ago ancestors had.

If you're going to make money you'll have to compete with the established breeders including webpages and even full page ads in nationally distributed magazines. Whether or not you make money depends on where in the feeding frenzy you jump in. If it still has some time to run you may do OK, but I wouldn't plan on making money long in the future.

-- Darren (df1@infi.net), January 17, 2002.

Alpacas are being sold as investment items. While its possible to make money today with alpacas, its not a long term income stream. Its expensive to get into, requires a little work, lots of time showing the animal, lots of time praying you get babies people will want to buy. While not an orgainzed pyrimid scheeme, the results are the same. Those who got in early make the money. BEWARE of this and any other get rich quick plans.

-- Gary (gws@columbus.rr.com), January 17, 2002.

Saw an ad in Lancaster Farming (www.lancasterfarming.com) for an alpaca herd dispersal. The phone number is 610-269-7210. It's in Southeastern PA, outside Philadelphia. You might want to contact them about alpacas, how much they're asking for them, and most importantly, why they're selling out!

-- Fran (on MD's Eastern Shore) (simpleplesurzfrm@dmv.com), January 17, 2002.

I really like alpacas. They are unbelievably cute (IMHO), a good size, quite docile, and (still) have wonderful fiber. I worked with a herd of 1200 (yup, 1200) alpacas for a couple of weeks and just fell in love with the animals. Even though these were virtually wild animals, they were easy to handle. I imagine with some regular, kind attention, they could actually get friendly. I spin and was really impressed with the fiber, too.

I'm looking forward to moving out to my property where I can have a couple of alpacas, BUT I would never pay the prices they are asking for breeding stock these days. This pyramid scheme is getting ready to bottom out, I predict. If you like the animals, buy a couple wethers and wait for the crash before buying breeding stock. I think there will always be a market for the fiber, and even for babies if they are priced reasonably (maybe a bit higher than nice sheep or angora goats).

-- Laura Jensen (lauraj@seedlaw.com), January 17, 2002.

I agree with Laura's comments. In Australia we've seen the alpaca boom as a miniature of what you have there, and it's peaked and pretty-well crashed. Stock are selling now for one or two hundreds where they were selling for up to one hundred times that much three or four years ago.

They are better stock too. If you want to learn about them while waiting for the prices to bottom, buy a couple of wethers. Stock quality will improve as well as prices drop in the next few years. Already we've seen average fibre diameter drop by a third, fleece quality improve as hair is bred out of the fleece, and fleece fibre variability reduced. It may take longer for these sorts of things to disseminate through a national herd as big as that of the USA, but the improvements will happen, even if you have to shop harder to find them.

Summary: they are beautiful-natured animals. The fleece has a marvelous feel (handle, technically), even though raw numbers say sheep's wool is finer and softer. Shearing is not as easy as with sheep. No-one is guaranteed to make money out of animals if they get in at the tail-end of a boom market, unless they can realistically make it out of produce sales (fleece sales in this case). Livestock sales prices will always crash when the market is saturated, and predicting that point is what bankrupts people or loses them their life savings (remember prices one percent of what they were a few years ago, here in Australia).

-- Don Armstrong (from Australia) (darmst@yahoo.com.au), January 17, 2002.

Kristean, I have worked with both llamas and alpacas and personally prefer alpacas. In my experience, they are easier to work with and their wool is wonderful. An acquaintance of mine would frequently go to auctions out west because the llamas and alpacas were much less expensive there. At auction, he could get pet grade llamas for $50 and alpacas for $100. I'm not sure where he went to auction, but maybe someone else who frequents here would know.

-- Sheryl in Me (radams@sacoriver.net), January 18, 2002.