Alpaca BIZ

The Alpaca BIZ

I am sure you saw the commercials that were all over cable for many years…the famous I LOVE Alpacas…the Huggable Investment ones. I admit, I was a bit skeptical of them, as it seemed a bit too ostrich and emu feeling for me. I had never seen ANY alpaca merchandise in any stores and it just felt a bit contrived to me. Geesh, that did not start off like a “sales pitch” trying to get anyone to buy my alpacas, now did it? I will tell you why…

As I investigated the alpaca business, and the various opportunities, I heard everything from I would be “guaranteed five digit figures for the sale of each and every animal and people were lined up to buy them” to “you shear them and the co-op buys the fleece” to “I don’t do anything with the fleece, the money is in selling the animals” to “knitters will buy the fleece right off their backs” and on and on and on. It was REALLY hard for me to try and separate the facts from the fiction.

But, I was smitten and loved the IDEA of having alpacas and enjoying raising animals that I would not have to slaughter at some point. So, I admit, we jumped right in and began to buy our herd. We luckily found some amazing local breeders and were able to find lovely people to work with. Since we are in a more rural area, we decided to buy a nice male. From almost 20 years of raising French Bulldogs, I KNEW the value of a good male. So, we found DC, bred by Northwest Alpacas. Both his father and both grandfathers are ALL StudMaster® herdsires. He has sure got the genes and the desire to do the job! Before we knew it, we were alpaca ranchers!

Now on to the FACTS…yes, you can make money in the alpaca business, but I will tell you…you will have to work at it. You will need to immerse yourself into learning all aspects of this business and how to work every single aspect of it to create income. You will need to become well versed with the FIBER end of the business, as well as just selling the animals. You will need to work your relationships within the alpaca community and build relationships. You will need to treat owning alpacas like a business, any other business, to succeed.

Now on to the FUN part. Even though you are treating this like a business, you get to enjoy working with very gentle, easy-to-raise adorable animals. IF you love working outdoors, IF you do not mind getting dirty and IF you are able to relax and let the animals enjoy being alpacas…this will be a BLAST!

There will more on this topic within the blog!