If you asked me a year ago what I knew about farming alpacas, the answer would have been “basically nothing”. All I knew at that point was that I had a dream of a farmstead in the middle of nowhere. In fact, it was almost exactly a year ago that we began to seriously consider purchasing a property and to shake up our life. I was struggling pretty badly with my mental health and I needed a change of scenery, but ultimately we thought that starting a farm would be more like a 5-10 year plan and not a 1-5year plan. Then we started researching alpaca farming and realized that it’s much more simple than we thought.
How did we get ready to pull the trigger on farming? We spend a lot of time researching and learning. I’m going to share some recommendations below if you too want to get into the alpaca farming game, because we ALWAYS need more alpaca farmers.
Researching when you’re starting
anything new is super important. Making sure you have resources, knowledge-bases and a general idea of what your future will look like is valuable. We spent the better part of 6 months finding all kinds of resources and information. We spent a lot of time watching youtube videos of other alpaca farms, reading social media and other alpaca farming resources. For example, Alpaca Farming with Alpaca Canada. You can find a lot of information on farming just on the internet, but your local library is another good place to go!
Finding the right people and adding them to your circle
is an extremely useful way to help make yourself feel comfortable with going all-in on a new endeavour. For us especially, Networking made us feel a lot more supported in our decision to have someone in our corner who has “been there and done that” and to also see people who are actively starting up so we can learn from them as they learn.
We both love reading
and having books to keep on hand as a reference for the “real deal” moments is a really useful tool as well. There are two books that we would recommend specifically for alpaca farming. These books aren’t really books to read all at once and should be more considered reference material/field guides.
Ultimately, getting hands on
with the animals was the best way to make us feel comfortable with our business plan and actually starting this adventure. Feeling the fibre, seeing the size in person and in comparison to our own body, watching how to handle them and learning what health signs to look for really helped us ease our nerves. There’s nothing that compares to seeing the world in person and when it comes to caring for animals the same is true. There are subtleties that are missed virtually and there’s an overarching sense of comfort that comes from having experienced alpaca care in person.
Hopefully reading about our experience with planning our business and getting information about things can help you! If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us on our social media or through the contact page.
Scheduling Change
Throughout this summer, we will unfortunately be quite busy with non-farm related activities including a wedding, an estate cleanup and a few other things. That said, we will be posting BI-WEEKLY from May-August instead of weekly and then in the fall we will return to weekly.
Rainbow River Alpacas 