Alpaca Clan Acres, USA

My husband, Terry and I, Dena bought our first alpaca in Febuary 2006. We knew immediately that we wanted to raise alpacas, so we bought a few more in our first year. In our second year we bought three more. We are up to fifteen alpacas now. Our plans are to grow. We have ten acres in Wellington, Colorado. Just twenty minutes from Wyoming and only twenty minutes from CSU, located in Fort Collins, Colorado.
We love raising our animals here in Colorado. Colorado is one of the five top states for this business. There are three top shows here every year, many organizations, allot of ranches that offer support, shearers for that time of the year, mobile vets that have an interest in Camellids, and the Colorado State University that many ranches take their animals to in time of need. In addition, Colorado's climate is one of the best for raising these animals. We don't have as much of the parasite worries here in our neck of the woods. After doing a fecal sample on our herd this year. We didn't even have to give them shots, they were all normal. In Wellington, it is drier and breezy. So, we don't have to worry about the West Nile Virus either. Of course, our herd has been BVD/PCR tested and the results are negative. This is a such a great state to live in for us and our alpacas!
We do not have plans on entering shows for awhile. Not until we finish our quarentine area we have started anyway. We feel we are to small to take the risk of exposing our herd to some of the things we have seen go around from the shows. We cannot afford the animal lost or expensive vet bills at this time. I'm content with keeping our animals safe and healthy. When we first got into the business we had experienced expensive vet bills with some of our animals. (I was beginning to doubt this business at that point). But we took care of it immediately and now that they are all healthy, we want them to stay that way.
It isn't only the physical balance we provide for our animals, we are also interested in keeping their pysch healthy. We can not stand to see them penned up in small areas without entertainment. We have divided our place so they all can roam and then we rotate pastures so they can all experience what the other alpacas our experiencing. Our plans are to expand more on this in the future. We live in our small house with our small backyard for our house dog. The alpacas own the rest of the property! We do not have a big barn, only three sided shelters for our herd, which seem to suit the alpacas just fine. We do want and will need more shelters. For emergency situations, we do have what we call our vet room with two stalls and a garage/barn place for indoor work. We love our place but wish we had more land. Maybe someday.