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Getting Started - Facilities
and Fencing
Your farm has to fit your style of managing your herd. You
can begin to develop your style by visiting other alpaca farms and seeing how
they've organized their facilities. But, in the end, your facilities and
fencing will be unique to your property.
If I have learned anything at all from this season of building our business,
it is to live by this motto: Farmers Must Be Flexible. We began designing our
farm layout with an evolving vision. We had an established farm rather
than a blank piece of property. We planned to use the existing
logistics of the property and meld them into a new, workable format. We
had to imagine how the farm would need to function as we progressed from a
start-up operation of just two yearling females to a full-service alpaca farm.
Next we had to somewhat alter the vision to fit the established mechanics of
the existing farm. The hay fields were producing, but for another farmer. We had to
decide which hay fields to convert into fenced pastures. The barns, built
in the late 1750's, were in pretty good shape so we had to form our plan around them. Did we want to use the barns as
full-time shelters for the animals? Did we want to use them as occasional
shelters for special circumstances? Did we not want to use them at all as
animal shelters? All these questions had to be considered and the plan
adjusted accordingly.
One thing we knew for sure. We wanted to be able to
enjoy watching the herd from the house, so we factored that in to the decision
process. That made it easy to choose which hay fields wou ld
become pastures. The physical layout of those pastures we would deal with
later.
We then thought about future herd management. We had already determined
that this was going to be a full-service alpaca farm. Being a full-service farm
would mean that we would need to be able to segregate animals according to age
and function within the herd, efficiently perform whatever tasks necessary for
heard health, and safely train the animals in agility and obstacle work.
We decided that, in the beginning, we would not use the existing barns as
animal shelters at all. We would use them strictly for hay and equipment
storage. Since we didn’t need to deal with the barns, other than minor
repairs, we moved on to the issue of pastures and fencing.
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