Alpaca facts

A chat with Sharon Milligan, who's the owner of Red Granite Ranch in Livermore, Colorado, about what you can do with alpacas. Here in the United States, Sheering and selling the wool is a new process here, even though the animals have been here for a little over 30 years, establishing that market, especially commercial market for fleece has been difficult. And that's something that they're working on now. A lot of people combine their selling of the fleece either in making their own home goods and selling them in their farms under an ag tourism kind of situation. Or we sell our fleece commercially and we make most of our money. Not that we don't make any of our fleece, it's just that we are what's called the seed stock. So we breed and sell animals to other farms and that's what we make our money from primarily, and that's breeding other animals for other farms. What's my Investment and what's my investment going to produce? Well, again, you want to know what your ultimate goals are going to be, just having a herd to have around to use for your own benefit and making a homemade items, then animals need to be bought. And in lots of two, they're a very social animal and they do not do well by themselves. If you're asking for a price that's going to vary tremendously based on the quality of the animal and the type of fleece that it produces. And obviously the babies, if you're going to be doing breeding so that price range is really difficult to pick a number on. Interested? redgraniteranch.com.