Our Story

Ever since we both graduated from college, we were always trying to find ways to add to our annual income (and shorten time to retirement).  We looked into buying existing businesses, starting up a franchise of some sort or just investing into rental property.   Although we have friends and family that have done all of these with varying degrees of success, we never found something we thought we would enjoy.

During the holidays of 2002, we were watching TV and relaxing when the word “Alpaca” came across the tube.  A couple of quick searches on the internet, and our interest was peaked.  Now you must realize, both of us grew up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh.  The closest we came to animals was the family dog or the neighborhood squirrel.  But we both love animals and envisioned living in a home on a large piece of property some day.  So we thought looking further into the alpaca industry was worth a few hours of our time.

Most of our initial research pointed to the same first step, go visit as many alpaca farms as you can!  To our amazement, there were over 10 farms in a 15 mile radius from our home.  In the early months of 2003, we visited over a dozen farms.  Each of the farms we visited were extremely helpful and provided us more and more information.  And all I can say, playing with a 1 month old cria for a few minutes will sell anybody on getting into the business.  But the key word here is “Business”.  Once we did our little tour of farms, we were hooked.  Now it was onto finding out if it was  financially feasible to accomplish.  At the time, we lived in a townhouse, so in addition to the cost of the animals, we were going to need to find a place where they (and us) could live.  So in addition to getting a business plan together for our farm, we were out looking for property.

By the fall of 2003, we finally found a home for sale that would meet our needs.  A nice 3 bedroom raised ranch sitting on 10 acres of almost level, cleared land with a 30 x 45 bank barn used to house a few horses.  Before New Years came, we became owners of our future alpaca farm.

Now we have the property, how about some animals?  In addition to the farm visits, we also did attend a few auctions.  We had a good idea of the range of prices, we just needed to decide how we wanted to go about running our farm.  We decided that smaller was better.  So we put our focus on buying the best quality animals with the budget we had set aside.   We decided to only purchase animals with full Peruvian bloodlines, strong confirmation and an array of colors.

In April of 2004, our three pregnant girls arrived.  One white, one medium fawn and one bay black.  Our herd quickly grew by the end of 2004 with the arrival of two girl crias.  Our heard was once again enlarged by the birth of our first boy in early 2005.  Today, we are up to 14 alpacas on the farm.  We have loved every minute of our involvement in the alpaca industry so far, and are very excited about what lies ahead.  If you’re interested in learn more about our experiences, please send us an email or give us a call.