Our family has been raising alpacas as lifestyle and an investment for the past ten years. Our farm, Fairhope Alpacas, specializes in helping new alpaca breeders get started. Contact me at alpacas (at) bellsouth.net for more information. You can also leave me your thoughts and questions in the comments section!

When we first got the alpacas, my first child was three and I was pregnant with my second. Very pregnant. The only way that I was able to convince a vet to work with alpacas (remember this was several years ago) was because he felt sorry for me because my huge belly made me a sympathetic figure.

The fencing wasn’t complete and the barn wasn’t completely finished when the first 2 alpacas arrived. The couple we bought them from was nice enough to deliver them on their way to visit their daughter in TX for Thanksgiving. But we couldn’t move the Thanksgiving holiday just because our barn wasn’t ready. So the alpacas arrived and we put them in a stall on the end of the barn that was already finished. Problem was that we had a nice stall in the barn, and one nice fenced pasture on the other side of the property, but they weren’t connected. To keep them safe from predators we wanted to put them in the barn at nigt. (We don’t do this anymore.) You should have seen me eight months pregnant running, chasing, trying to herd 2 alpacas from out in the huge field into a door of the barn. Um, they weren’t having it. Thanks to alpaca Joe for the advice to use ropes on t-posts to create a temporary alleyway for them to pass from pasture into barn. Alleyways are so key. Whew! That wore me out. I remember walking in and immediately popping in Marty McGee’s video on handling alpacas, thinking I had so much to learn!