Alpacas are amazingly cool as far as livestock go. Cute, valuable, manageable, and no troubling end-trip to the dinner table, in the U.S. they are raised for their intrinsic value as breeding stock and their fiber and are shorn once a year. Other factors that make them ideal for new and small breeders are that they don't require extraordinary care, feed, or housing and are easy to handle and train. In addition, national and regional co-ops exist to help breeders cost effectively process their fiber. Oh yeah, and they really are beautiful.

The Animal

Alpacas are members of the Camelid family, which also includes camels, llamas, guanacos, and vicuna. Unlike the llama and camel, which are used primarily as a pack animals, the alpaca is raised for its fine fiber. The two main breeds of alpacas are huacayas and suris. Some of the links on the right of this page go into more detail about the characteristics of each. The short version is that the huacayas are the fluffy looking ones and suris are dreadlocked. As of July 2007, ARI showed registered currently about 150,000 alpacas in the U.S., about 30,500 of them huacayas and about 6,500 of them suris.

The alpaca itself is a small endearing animal, generally weighing between 120 and 175 pounds. Their diet consists mostly of pasture grass and/or hay and fresh water. Like most breeders, we supplement with minerals and vitamins, but seldom with feed, except during the depths of winter. Our experience with them is that they are very low maintenance. We wind up taking our two dogs to the vet more often than we have the vet out for a herd of alpacas.

Though native to the high Andes plateaus of Peru, Chile, and Bolivia, alpacas have been imported to the U.S. since 1984 and they have adapted easily to the North American climate and conditions. Some of the first imports to the U.S. came from Chile and Bolivia. Later imports also included Peruvian animals, which came from regions and farms with more controlled breeding programs (like Accoyo and Alianza). There are no hard and fast rules and many debates center on which animals are "best," but in general, U.S. breeders tended to look at animals of Chilean and Bolivian descent for their color genetics and animals of Peruvian descent for their conformation, and fiber density and uniformity. Though many fine colored animals are of Peruvian descent and many well fleeced animals are of Chilean descent. Increasingly, as animals have been cross bred and improved in the U.S., the country of descent is becoming less important as the U.S. alpaca is beginning to emerge.

The Fiber

Alpaca fiber compares favorably to the finest merinos and is generally classed with luxury fibers like cashmere, mohair, and angora, both because of its fineness and its relative scarcity. As a fiber animal, alpacas are additionally distiguished by the fact that they produce a wide array of rich natural colors from whites and fawns to browns, greys, maroons, and true blacks. The Alpaca Registry (ARI) color chart categorizes this range into 22 distinct colors, but really the variations are infinite. Alpacas are one of the few fiber producing animals still capable of naturally producing true jet black fiber. How cool is that?