[QUOTE=friedo]
That article says you could get a “fiber quality” (presumably neutered) male for $1000, whereas studs range from $4000 to $10,000 and females range up to $16,000. So I imagine if you buy a large number of males you could make a profit on the fiber (though you’d need to buy or rent the occasional stud for breeding, or else keep buying new males every year.)
Those are also 1994 prices; presumably the market has changed a lot since then.
[/QUOTE]
It’s changed a HEAP, at least in Australia.
My mother has alpacas, and although she is just a hobbyist who doesn’t need to make an income from them, she knows lots of people within the Australian alpaca community, many of whom are prominent breeders and dealers.
My mother’s herd at the moment consists entirely of wethers (castrated males, sometimes also called geldings), and she usually has somewhere between 14 and 22 animals. She gets them shorn, and she spins the wool herself, then knits it into sweaters, scarves, etc., and sells them at various markets and shows.
When she started getting into alpacas, in the early 1990s, they were really expensive in Australia. Even wethers routinely went for a couple of thousand dollars, fertile females were typically around $10,000 or more, and the really prime stud males could fetch prices into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
At the top end of the market, massive prices can still be had for prime stud males or breeding females, but the middle and bottom end of the market have really fallen away over the last ten years or so. My mother frequently gets offered animals for free. Often this is because they have some small imperfection in their conformation or appearance that makes them unsuitable for showing and breeding, but often their fleece is perfectly good. My mother has won ribbons at plenty of shows for the quality of her fleeces.
She knows quite a few people who have done very well off alpacas, but also know others who have sunk a lot on money into them for very little or no return. Those who made the most money seemed to be those who got in early and made a good profit from breeding when the prices were still very high. Many of these folks are still in business, so it wasn’t a purely speculative industry, but the demand for alpaca wool really couldn’t sustain the prices at their initial levels.
The raw fleece used to go for over $100 a kilogram (about $45 a pound), but it’s far cheaper than that now, i believe. Like with animals themselves, my mother also frequently gets offered large bags of raw fleece that other alpaca people can’t use and can’t sell. She has a huge store of high quality fleece, and told me that she could probably spin and knit for the rest of her life using just the bags of fleece in her garage.
As i said, the whole market aspect of the industry doesn’t really affect her very much. She’s retired and does it purely as a hobby. She sells her sweater for two to three hundred dollars each, but if you work out how long it takes to shear the animals, spin the fleece, and knit the sweater by hand, she probably only makes a few dollars an hour. From what she’s told me, i believe that the amount she gets from selling her work basically covers the cost of keeping the alpacas, with a bit of extra spending money left over.
I’m not sure how similar the situation is in the US, but i believe that prices have come down here as well. One problem that some breeders have is that the cost of insurance can become prohibitive. When you have animals worth five or even six figures, you need some insurance against disease, accidents, weather- and temperature-related deaths, and death to females while giving birth. Those costs can really add up.
