Member-only story
Confessions of a Reluctant Alpaca Farmer
With a little help from the internet, I gave myself the DIY farming experience of a lifetime
“What a lovely day to become an alpaca farmer,” Hilary said to me six years ago as she got ready to unload her trailer in the March sunshine. She’d driven to my home in Tuscany, Italy, from neighboring Umbria, where she once kept a substantial herd of alpacas.
I’d first read about breeding these exotic camelids in a magazine article while visiting my mother in the U.K. Always on the lookout for alternative ways of surviving in Italy, where I’d lived since buying a rundown farmhouse in 1994, I loved the idea of caring for beautiful and unusual animals that could be bred and sold. My mother also loved the idea, and we spent many happy hours discussing it. At the time, I didn’t have the land or resources to take it further, but a move and some money left to me when my lovely mother died in 2012 meant I could have alpacas. She would have liked that, I think.
I selected some of Hilary’s, mail-order style, on the internet. Alpacas come in two types, and although most people love the woolly, teddy-bear Huacayas, I had fallen irrevocably in love with the sophisticated Suris and their silky, swinging coats. As the Suris are rarer, more expensive, and supposedly more difficult to…
