Getting Ready for our Herd

We have started the arrangements for our three incoming Alpaca. The start of our herd. So what does it take to prepare for a new herd? A lot of work...

First up is to prepare the land. We specifically purchased land that already had a great deal of natural grass growing, but we want to make sure to keep anything poisonous out of our pastures. We also want to make sure we can keep our Alpaca safe. The first step to that is installing fencing. The property already had a lot of good existing fencing but we needed to add a bit more to ensure they would remain in the pasture and that predators would remain out.

There are multiple schools of thought for keeping predators out. One option is to have a guard animal. This could be a Livestock Guardian Dog (LGD), a llama, or a donkey. The other option is to make the property "undesirable" to predators. In our area, the main predators are coyote and wild boar. We have yet to see either make an appearance. We have put things in place to make it undesirable for predators here, but we are also looking at adding an animal guardian as well.

Next up, we needed to purchase all the supplies we would need. Some of the necessary supplies are vaccinations, medicines, feeders, water buckets, livestock scales, pellets, minerals, and many many many more. This is initially a big investment but absolutely necessary to have safe and happy Alpacas for years to come.

Lastly, there is the business itself. We created an Limited Liability Corporation and have to file (so many!) documents with Federal and State agencies. Since we will also have an Alpaca retail store and hope to have Farm Days (more on that in future blogs) in the future we also needed to create a website. We hope you like it and that it has everything you would like to see. But if you want to see something else, please let us know in the comments.

We are so excited to get ready to welcome our herd onto our ranch and get to know them and share all about them with you!

#ranchprep #alpacas