Llamas and alpacas

[RJohnson]

RichZ,
Here is a site you should do some reading about llamas before you buy, http://exoticpets.about.com/pets/exoticpets/cs/llamacare/index.htm?iam=dpile&terms=+llamas.
They are fine animals and if you just want a couple for pets then you might consider buying gelded males. They are usually cheaper than females if you are not going to breed them. The males are usually bigger and stronger than the females and they can be trained to pack or pull a cart. After saying that my wife has a female that can put her chin on my head and I am 6-2/w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif.
If you want to save the wool then look into getting a fine wool llama but down here in Texas its gets so hot that we must shear them to reduce heat stress. So the wool is not as long as some of the heavy wool llamas up north.
LLamas come in a variety of colors and the amount of wool that will be on the animal so I would just get whatever strikes you fancy. But be warned there are breeders who breed for gentility and there are bleeders who breed for wool. I would make sure that the llamas you buy are of the friendly disposition. They are shy gentle animals and are not like a dog that likes to be petted all the time. Good luck and drop me a line if I can be of futher help.

Randy

 

[Anonymous Poster]

Hi Rich,

I've been looking at alpacas for a few months now and I'm real excited about them. I've bought four females but haven't taken possession of them yet.

I could go on and on about them -- so email me if you have any specific questions don@rainierinternet.com. Here's a brief overview of what I've learned.

Alpacas are bred on the supposition that there will be a viable market for their fleece someday. There is no such market currently, as there are only 300,000 alpacas in the US now, and they take a full 11 months to gestate. The fleece, called fiber, is extremely fine, second only to the vicuna. It's much warmer, lighter, stronger, and it's not prickly like wool. It contains no lanolin.

Alpacas are easy to raise and easy on the environment. The imports tend to be skittish, but most will eat out of your hand once they are around people enough. They don't eat much. You might have enough grass so that you don't need to buy hay. Most give them a grain supplment. You have to trim their toenails and teeth occaisionally, and shear them once a year. They yield around 7 pounds of fiber per year.

Good breeding females will cost you $9,000 to $30,000 and up. Gelded males are about $500, unproven studs are a few thousand, and top end studs can in $100,000 or more, when the sell at all. Breedings are $1,000 to $3,500 or even $5,000 for some of the top studs.

There are a lot of problems with llama pedigrees, which makes breeding dicey. The alpaca registry was done pretty well from the beginning -- most domestic alpacas are in the ARI database, and their offspring are put in their too. Don't buy an animal that has no ARI number. Incidentally this prevents theft from being much of a problem, as an unregistered alpaca is pretty much worthless.

Fiber sells for maybe $40 per pound if it's clean. This pretty much pays for feed, that's it

The mony in alpacas is breeding. Here are some tips on breeding. Animals have a phenotype, the manifestation of their own genes, and a genotype, the sum of all their genes, both expressed and unexpressed. ALWAYS buy for genotype. That means look for a female that has produced consistent offspring, and look for the same in studs. You might get a threadbare female with a good genotype -- this may well be a bargain. On the other hand, you will lose big if you buy an animal that happens to look good yet produces mediocre offspring. There is also a feature called prepotency, which is the proclivity of an animal to pass on it's own characteristics to it's babies (called crias for alpacas) relative to the other parent. It's good to find a good female who always produces crias that look like her. Similarly, if you are breeding a mediocre female, find the best, most prepotent male to stud with you can afford.

As stated above, the females are real expensive, but this is a blessing too -- their offspring are valuable too.

There are to strains of alpacas -- suri and huacaya. Suris acount for maybe 10% of all alpacas, and are more expensive. They should not be intermixed. Suris produce huacayas occaisionally. Suris have straight hair, whereas huacayas are fluffy and have "crimpy" fiber. My personal opinion is that huacayas are the better animal, for two reasons: the fiber stays cleaner, and nobody wants a huacaya thrown by a suri, so with suris you get a percentage of low-value animlas. They are also more tempermental on the whole.

Breeders look for fiber characteristics, color, and also the conformation of the animal -- straightness of back, clean bite, straight legs, etc.

Finally, they are wonderful pets!

Best of luck,
Don

 

[Bird]

Whew, I know absolutely nothing about alpacas, but can't help but wonder whether they will go the way of the emus in this area. They were very expensive to buy and the only buyers were breeders buying from each other in the expectation that there would be a market for them in the future. That market never materialized, so the people who had emus killed them, just turned them loose, gave them away if they could find anyone who would take them, etc. The last emu farm in my neighborhood finally managed to give them all away and the owner sold the land (after only a $250,000 loss, he says).

Bird

 

[cowboydoc]

Bird,
Those were my thoughs exactly! Spending 9-30k on a possible market is not good business sense in my opinion. You could also add the Arabian horse fiasco to that long list of "future markets".

 

[gws]

Llama's took the same route as Alpaca's are now. Expensive breader to breader selling. Now they have come down to a reasonable price animal. Even winning breeding females are not that expensive. Lllama's and Alpaca's get turned into show animals, fiber generators and pets. Emu died due to a single market that didnt mature. If you want to make money in Llama's your time is up. If you want to make money in Alpaca's the hurry up, you time is almost gone. In either case get a couple of animals and enjoy them.

Gary.

 

[RichZ]

Bird, I feel that you and Richard are absolutely right. We heard alot of hype on how you could make money on llamas and alpacas. They are very interesting animals, and as animal lovers we were very interested. We did alot of research and visited several llama and alpaca farms here in upstate NY. Upon investigation, we found that the only market was in selling the offspring to other farms or people who wanted to get into owning them. There is no actual market for the wool, even though people who are trying to sell you the animals tell you that you can sell it for as much as $10 per ounce!! I think it's ridiculous to spend thousands of dollars on animals, when you have no chance on any return of your investment. Unless of course you have money to burn on an intersting hobby. (Which we don't!) As I said they are interesting animals, and when the hype goes down and they end up becoming very inexpensive, we could end up with a pair of each for pets. After visiting about a dozen llama and alpaca "farms", I never saw where any income was coming from.

Rich

 

[gws]

RichZ,
There are markets for llama/alpaca wool, but its not at $10/ounce. Its small nitch markets where you can sell it for a few dollars/lb. I know several people who can make enough off the wool to keep them in hay for a year. Not that it takes much hay. I give my wool away to the lady who shears my llamas. She like to spin and raises llamas specificly for that. Your not going to get rich no with llamas, Alpaca, maybe for a few years. Llamas need to be treated like horses, The cost money to have, The high dollar animal is few and far between. They make great pets, 4h projects and you can make money on them, Just dont try have them as your sole income stream.




Gary.

 

[Anonymous Poster]

You all may be right, alpaca fiber may never be a significant industry. You all didn't bring up anything I didn't consider though. Here is my point of view.

First, how much do you pay for other breeding livestock? For a cow easily $10,000 or even $50,000 or more. With horses the sky is the limit. As with alpacas, these females don't have a lot of value aside from their genes and reproductive capability.

Second, you should feel a good garment made from alpaca. As far as I'm concerned there's nothing that compares to it. Couple this with the fact that alpacas eat less and are hardier than sheep, and I can't imagine a market not developing for alpaca fleece (as somebody else pointed out, it is currently a niche market for hand spinners and other artisans). There are and always will be people who covet alpaca garments.

Third, it's a wonderful lifestyle. Ranching alpacas seems like as good a life as I can imagine for me and my family.

Finally, what if it does work? What if top end females continue to sell for ten or twenty thousand or more? If you get a few good females who can reproduce themselves consistently, then you make thousands off of each good female you produce. Males are usually considered bad luck, although if you get an excellent one, and have some luck developing a stud market for him, you will be in high cotton. Alpacas are excellent on small acreage, and most people haven't even heard of them, so the market seems huge. Worst case the animals have got to worth a few thousand just based on the fleece value.

I can't afford to do this as a hobby, and yes I will be disappointed if this turns out to be a bust, but I won't have any regrets about trying.

Later
Don

 

[RichZ]

Don, good luck, I hope you know what you're doing. Like you, I put a lot of research into this, and I have never found an alpaca or llama farm that even broke even, much less made a profit. They were all run by people who were already quite well to do and enjoyed raising gentle and interesting animals. I'd love to do that, too. But it's way too expensive a hobby for me! I hope you're not depending on this as your sole income!!/w3tcompact/icons/shocked.gif

Rich

 

[MarkV]

Don,

First, I don't know a thing about alpacas except that I like the sweater my wife got me. What would worry me about a market for the fleece is what it can be imported for. When I was in Lima, Peru you could go to the open markets and buy sweaters for $25 and slippers for $5. I don't know the export rules, but there a bunch of alpacas in that part of the world.

MarkV