I don’t know why the original owner had to give them up but I think Penny has been very nice taking them all, normally for someone who needs to get out of farming had to spend months selling their animals.
In regards to other ranchers telling on them, that’s not likely to happen. With this many animals it kinda like kids in a bad house. You want to call CPS but know that your not gonna take the kids and they will end up in a worse foster home.
if the other ranchers could take the pacas they would. Truth is, Penny is the only one dumb enough to take that huge responsibility. The harsh reality is, it’s either the alpaca get a new home or they are destroyed.
also people debating if Alpcas are a profitable animal. No there not. How do I know this? Because not many people farm them (especially as their primary animal) . If they were easy to make profit from you would see them a lot more.
At some point they're going to probably decide that it's better for the animals even if they do have to be put down--that it'll be a more humane death for those poor paca.
And my main feeling here is that it doesn't matter if alpaca are profitable animals in
general, it's more a question of if they'd be profitable on that site. The pictures I've seen... I wouldn't attempt bees (yet). Sheep might be okay on that moonscape. I've seen worse soil, but I've been in the high desert; plants will take a lot of work on getting the soil up to snuff. Goats might do actually pretty decently, there might be enough forage for them to have your feed costs
not be insane no matter what.
I'd actually opt for solar farming, and with the animals at the front end being just pets/companions. Use the space that buys me to work on improving the soil, gather information about what I can do to get the fact my soil sucks hard enough that I don't have a weed problem fixed...and probably do a few rounds of just growing wildflowers and/or clover. Eventually I'd look at hives and more directly profitable plants, once I got the damn grass to grow well enough I'm not looking at spending a fortune on feed because my pastures look like low-key desert.
Then I'd figure out what herd animals are going to do best.
If I was setting out to raise alpaca? That land is ugly. I would not buy it.
As for the yarn: Yeah, no, that stuff won't sell. The markup is insane--and they aren't providing the information that somebody wanting to knit or crochet with it would need to know how much to buy. Weight, yardage, and thickness--in yarn jargon, weight--of the yarn, and %s of fibers are all things somebody looking at making something with the yarn needs to know; from the pictures I've seen of the alpaca, they're
also not sheering them on the right schedule which minimaxes for the length of fibers and the health of the animal, and to go with the earlier rants, length of fiber is
huge on the yarn quality and the rule of thumb is longer fibers=better. (This is what you breed for, and why a top-quality show angora looks like a bunny version of Cousin It. You also are aiming for that when you're making artificial fibers which
is something I've worked with.) Even if they're in good enough health for those fibers to be nice and strong--and the bit on that was accurate, just missed that applies to
all fur and hair, including human--if they're sheered too often they'll not have thick enough coats to be okay through the winter, and the fibers won't be long enough.
They're amazingly clueless, and it's weird because the fiber arts are stereotypically feminine. (Doesn't mean guys won't, just means the guys who do are either femme or
really secure in their masculinity.) You'd think they'd have taken it up themselves, but I guess it too closely resembles 'producing things of value to society' for them.
modernfarmer.com
