Child’s Play Alpaca is the result of combining a serial hobbyist who has addictive tendencies with a nurturer who has an affinity for cuteness!  Within minutes of Loretta saying that she would love to have alpacas some day, the plan was in motion and it was too late to turn back.

So what triggered this perpetual motion, you ask?

On our honeymoon, we drove by alpacas on the side of the rode and Loretta asked if I have ever seen an alpaca.  I told her that I have heard of them and wished we could have some! After my beautiful wife agreed that she would like to own some as well, I spent the next 6 hours doing research.

With nothing to do that day, we looked online and found a small farm nearby called Foss Mountain Farm. We decided we should stop by and see what it was all about.  We loved what we discovered and were hooked from that point on.  When we left, Lana and Dick told us that they hoped we would come back someday to visit or maybe even purchase some alpacas.

Three days after we returned home from our honeymoon, I had already enlisted my father to help me build a barn and I started clearing the land. After many hours of child labor, fueled by a ridiculous amount of candy, we broke ground on the barn a month later and haven’t looked back since.

What Was Our Plan?

Honestly, we didn’t have one! We didn’t even know we really needed one and even if we had, our basal knowledge was limited to “oooh, that one is pretty!”.

When I started doing my research, I found many successful people suggesting that we start out by focusing on a specific niche.  We took that advice and decided that we would focus on grey huacaya’s.  We started out with two bred females, both bred to quality studs, and decided we would work forward from there.

That plan changed when we found that a prior breeding, which was previously thought to have not taken, to our third female,  was actually going to result in a cria within a month of us signing the purchase contract. Morning Beckons was nice enough to let us purchase a second cria, so the first one would not be alone, and we would borrow the dam until the cria was ready to be weaned.

What’s Next

We have been in a growth stage since we started but we will need to level out and focuss on our successes soon.  We are at a point where we will need to continue to grow, but really need to make sure that we are making the best breeding decisions possible and giving ourselves the best chance for success.

We don’t expect to be profitable any time soon, and we are OK with that, but we need to see some sort of income in the next year or two to show that it is going to be worth it.  We need to see something that will show us that it is worth continuing to build and grow.

We have been reluctant to sell any of our alpacas to this point because we are looking to grow our foundation herd, but that will need to change if we want to continue to improve on what we have.  Moving forward, we plan to aggressively market any animals born from two animals that we own.