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
. From our research and experience, they make easy and cheap pets. I don't know how to make money with them. All four required just 20 bales of hay this winter (central Ohio) and eat a bag of oat in 6 months. We have females, only, and we have never had one spit at a human. 
