Before you bring any alpacas home, you need to make sure you can cover the minimum standard of care for housing and maintaining your new herd. While alpacas are technically easy keepers, there is more involved here than people think. Alpacas are unlike other livestock and they require a different set of standards. Before we dig into the specifics to alpacas, I believe it is important to touch on the “five freedoms.”
In 1965, Francis Brambell established a set of standards for livestock referred to as the five basic freedoms:
- Freedom from hunger and thirst – By access to fresh water and a diet to maintain full health and vision.
- Freedom from discomfort – By provision of an appropriate environment including shelter and rest areas.
- Freedom from pain, injury or disease – By prevention or rapid diagnosis and appropriate treatment including humane slaughter.
- Freedom to express normal behavior – By providing sufficient space, proper facilities, and company.
- Freedom from fear and distress – By ensuring that conditions and treatment avoid mental suffering.
You may read those standards and think these are common sense items. However, it is important to understand those freedoms mean different things to different types of livestock. Alpacas are unique and they have nuances that owners need to adhere to.
Preparing for Your New Alpaca Herd
I’m known for over-qualifying potential alpaca buyers, but I do so to make sure our alpacas are going to good homes. If farms are local, we typically do site visits to help discuss plans and validate the setup will be appropriate. When selling alpacas to new owners in other states, we consult via Zoom, photos, and videos. It’s an important step and one I take seriously.
Below is a list of minimum standards we run through with all new owners we mentor.
Alpacas Need a Herd for Proper Mental and Physical Health
You should have at least three alpacas of the same sex. We sometimes will recommend five as a starter number depending on the alpacas being rehomed. Alpacas are herd animals, so they need a herd to feel physically safe. If they don’t have a herd, their mental health suffers, and this quickly leads to a physical decline. If you’re new to alpacas this requirement can sound a little silly but trust me when I say it is not. Alpacas are intelligent animals, and they have a lot of awareness for their surroundings, which includes alpacas, predators, and humans. They feel much safer in a group of other alpacas.
Male and Female Alpacas Must Be Kept Separate
Males and females cannot live together in the same pen or barn. Female alpacas do not have a traditional cycle so they can mate at any time. The males know this and their desire to breed is present 365 days a year, 7 days a week, and 24 hours a day. If males and females are together, breeding will happen and most intercourse happen at night when the humans are fast asleep. Should frequent breeding occur, it will compromise the female’s health by tearing her apart internally. This will eventually kill her if you leave them together. This outcome also applies to gelded males. Like a human, gelding an alpaca takes away the ability to produce offspring, but it does not take away the ability to have intercourse.
Breeding Farms Require Multiple Paddock Areas
Breeding farms will need additional shelter and paddock areas for small boys. If you plan on breeding alpacas, it is important that you reserve shelter and paddock space for young males. At roughly six-month-old males will be old enough to potentially breed a female, so crias are traditionally weened at this time. These young males are still too young to go into the regular adult male area, so they will need to be segregated until about two years old. Your farm setup needs to include this additional space. Should you ignore this advice and place young boys in with adult males, the older males will mount and attempt to breed the younger males. The young males will have internal damage, and in many cases, they will also have external physical damage (or death) from the weight of the older male.
Alpacas Need Space to Move
Alpacas cannot live in a traditional backyard, and they need an area big enough to roam and play. An alpaca generally doesn’t run around a lot, but they are known to pronk (half skip, half run) occasionally, and young male alpacas love to wrestle. You need to make sure they have enough room for this type of activity. If you don’t have adequate space, you’ll create unnecessary stress on the alpacas and you’ll have to deal with a whole lot of fighting.
Alpacas Need Shelter From the Elements
The minimum standard of care for an alpaca in the USA includes shelter from weather. A barn or three-sided shelter that will protect them from extreme cold, heat, or rain is needed. This should be available 24/7.
When considering your future barn setup, keep your current and future needs at the forefront of your mind. Your chosen shelter will need to provide protection from weather, shade, good ventilation, electric for water buckets and fans, and most likely an area for storing hay and equipment. If you plan on breeding, be mindful of the space needed for your growing herd.
When we visited Peru, alpacas and their camelid cousins roamed free. In many cases they did not have barns, fencing, hay, or water. They were allowed to meander through open land decided where and how they should spend their time, what they would eat, and they were required to locate their own water source. While that all sounds great, it is important to remember that Peru has mild temperatures throughout the year. And even with the milder weather, alpacas have a much higher mortality rate in Peru than they do in the USA. These living conditions attribute to that higher death rate.
Nightlights Encourage Inside Sleeping
We’ve found our alpacas don’t want to sleep in full light, and they don’t want to sleep in pitch dark when inside a structure. They enjoy a soft nightlight to offer a little light throughout the night. All of our barns have these available and in use.
If you want to be really progressive, you can use automation to set up routines to have your regular lights come on and off at certain times and turn your nightlights on at alternate times. Since I am a former city girl, I will admit I set this up on Google. It makes life easier for me and my herd.
Alpacas Will Need Electricity in Extreme Weather
Alpacas are not high maintenance animals, but they do need water in winter, and this may require a heated water bucket to prevent the water from freezing in cold weather. In warmer months they’ll need fans to keep cool. Even in Northern Michigan, we have fans running in every barn throughout the summer so the herd can get out of the sun and cool off in front of a fan when desired.
Alpacas Need Proper Fencing and Gates
Alpacas are prey animals, so they have virtually no defense capabilities. Fencing is designed more to protect alpacas from predators, then to keep them confined to a specific space. We recommend a five-foot, no-climb fence to help keep the alpacas safe and away from roaming dogs or coyotes. Due to their thick fiber, electric fencing and barb wire fencing are dangerous and should not be considered.
Gate selection will follow the same guidelines as the fence itself. The one addition is to carefully consider your gate closures. If you are having large agritourism activities, you may want to have latches that allow easy locking. This is needed when you have an open farm day with thousands or visitors arriving. A lot of visitors won’t understand the nuances of farm life and safety, so you’ll need to protect the humans and alpacas alike. Having a gate you can lock with a key or combination will save you lots of hassles as visitors come and go.
Alpacas Cannot be Housed With Other Livestock
An alpaca does not have the physical fortitude to withstand foreign parasites from sheep, goats, cows, etc. They also cannot protect themselves against kicking horses or ramming goats. If you want your farm to have multiple types of livestock, you’ll need dedicated shelter, paddocks, and grazing areas for the alpacas.
Learn More: Can I Raise Alpacas With Other Animals?
Additional Barn Supplies
As you plan your barns and layout don’t forget about purchasing and arranging things like hay feeders, water buckets, feed buckets for grain, and a bucket for loose minerals.
Alpacas are cousins to the camel, so they don’t drink an overabundance of water. The average alpaca will drink about 1-1.5 gallons (or 5-7 quarts) a day and this needs to be clean. Our girl barn has automatic waters that are built into the cement. These work amazing for all types of weather. Our boy barns have small automatic waterers in spring through fall, then we fall back to heated water buckets in winter. There is significant price difference between all-weather waterers and seasonal waterers. The fancy, built-in waterers (Jug) are $1,000+ each, while the seasonable variety (Little Giant) is about $50 each.
Our feed buckets are simple $10 buckets that are bought from any farm supply store. They have a lip so they fit over a railing and can easily be moved around. These are lined up inside our barns and we have one for each alpaca. Each morning and night we use these to provide grain. We separate these out to reduce arguments and to allow everyone to have sufficient time to eat. You’ll want to place these low enough so the alpacas can naturally bend down to eat, but not so low poop can collect in them. We have an additional bucket in each barn to hold loose minerals that the alpacas will eat when needed.
Our hay bins are made of metal and wood. We purchased two from a farm we helped and then my husband built the rest. We make sure we have hay feeders inside the barn and outside in the paddock areas. Alpacas like to be outside, so if the weather is suitable, they will spend more time eating outside then they will inside.
Large metal garbage cans work great for storing grain close to where you’ll need it, while also keeping curious alpacas out of the food so it doesn’t become a free-style buffet. Trust me when I say you will need these, and they will make your life easier. Alpacas are smart and they will get into things if they are not child proof.
Creating Your Shopping List
For some people the planning phase of your alpaca journey is exciting and for others it can be overwhelming. I’m the type of person that loves the planning part, but that is because I love creating lists. I really want to wrap up this discussion with an easy to reference list that you can reference as you move forward. Use this as a starting point and talk to your mentor about what else might apply.
- Shelter – Three sided at a minimum with a minimum of 18 square feet per alpaca
- Fencing – Secure five-foot fencing for paddock areas
- Gates – Easy to use closures with optional locks
- Hay bins – One for each barn and paddock area
- Water buckets – One per barn with ability to heat in colder temperatures
- Fans – Used in warmer weather to keep alpacas cool
- Hay – Second cutting hay (we love orchard grass) in round or square bails with enough to cover 2.5 pounds per day per alpaca for days not on pasture
- Grain – Pelleted alpaca feed, with enough to feed .5 pounds per alpaca per day
- Minerals – Free choice minerals made especially for alpacas
- Feed buckets – One per alpaca if feeding grain and one per barn for minerals
- Straw – Great for providing bedding in extreme weather
- Livestock scale – Desirable for monthly herd health evaluations
- Halter and lead – Desirable for medical care, transportation, and/or country walks
- Rakes and shovels – Used for manure clean up (cheap rakes seems to work best)
- Wagon – Used for transporting manure during clean up
- Nail trimmers – Used for occasional toe trimming in between shearing
- Hair clippers – Used to keep fur out of eyes (not all alpacas will require this)
- Ivermectin or Dectomax – Used to proactively treat for m-worm in white tail deer areas
- Syringes – Used to administer monthly injections
- Fecal testing equipment – Optional device used to perform on-site fecal tests
Remember not every alpaca farm will require all these items. For example, we didn’t start with our own fecal testing equipment, but we did purchase this later because my husband really wanted to be able to perform his own tests. Most farms would provide fecal samples to their livestock vet for testing.
The important takeaway is you want to be prepared, so you can welcome your alpaca home and enjoy the moment. In a perfect world, you’ll have all your shopping done in advance so you can spend quality time with your alpacas and enjoy their rich and unique personalities.
