Goats, Sheep or Alpacas?

The kids and I were discussing raising mid-size livestock. The choice was between goats, sheep or alpacas. Currently alpacas and goats are winning in the most useful in our opinion. Sheep had wool but the alpacas had more to offer then then sheep

Goats:
good brush hogs
Can milk them
Eat them
Smaller
Easy animals to raise
Friendly

Alpacas:
can use wool
sometimes called the other red meat
good leather
Not much milk
They mainly eat grass
Docile but spit

Has anyone thought of raising goats, sheep or alpacas? I would think raising these vs. a cow would be easier on a smaller plot of land.

 

I know people who have had goats. They said don't get goats.

 

Sheep hands down! If we want so noble right now, that' what we would have! You can still get the Scotish or the Newfoundland long hairs and really do well, the milk is good, although a little less then goats, better quality, the wool is far superior, and when it's time, the meat isn's all that bad, best made into sausage or burger!

 

I would expand your little farm and add a Neufoundland dog to your setup, superior security, and a great working animal with strength far beyond it's size! Relatively low maintenance, no real dietary challenges, and one hell of a working dog for a small to medium farm! Seriously, a worthy investment that pays for it's self daily!

 

If you try to fence a goat in, you better build the fence without any fence posts. Otherwise the goats will simply walk up one side of the posts, do a Goat Ballet on the top, and then walk down the other side.

 

If you don't need the wool, I would opt for rabbits, small, reproduce rapidly, don't compete with you for food, and supply meat, chickens, all the advantages of rabbits plus eggs, and pigs. With pigs you get rapid reproduction, multiple young per litter, rapid maturity, source of fat and calories which will be needed in vegetarian and grain based diet, can tolerate wide temp changes and during at least part of the year forage on their own, will eat almost any table or food scraps, and their manure is excellent fertilizer.

 

Exactly, we have pounds and pounds of shed we have yet to do any thing with, but it's there cleaned and ready to go, and he keeps on producing every season! There is enough right now to fill 6 or 7 bed pillows, to give an example, and 5hats with out shering! The Golden Retriever is almost exacty half the output, but sheds twice as often! We have only been saving his shed for 7 years, but it' enough for 4 to 5 more pillows worth!

 

T-posts for goats tall no climb brand fencing and do not allow your fence to be near a tree or bush they can climb, I do not like sheep yuck mutton is disgusting alpaca as mentioned they spit and the meat is not much better than mutton. Mint jelly is a camouflage to attempt to make the meat of sheep palatable in my opinion.

Goats are challenging so you won't mind whacking one for meat in fact you will have a certain amount of satisfaction because some are very annoying. another would be burros hey meat is meat but at least burros are pack animals they can defend and protect other animals the can be adopted from the BLM but need to be trained they eat less than a horse combined with goats they do OK. Alpine`s are a good breed

Goat milk is non allergenic children who cannot drink regular milk can most times nurse on goat milk. It is easily pressure canned and stored for years in mason jars can be used to make butter and cheese for cooking and to raise / nurse abandon critters.

 

I looked into alpacas about 18-19 years ago. They were ridiculously expensive. Maybe it has changed since then. There was the Alpaca Owners and Breeders Association, or something like that, back then which was a good bit like the American Kennel Club in that it registers alpaca, etc.

There were a number of alpacas imported into US in the 70/80’s or so that formed the original national stock of animals. The breeders association permitted no new imports to be registered and all offspring had to have bloodlines from the original stock. They enforced this with DNA testing. Why was that needed? Alpacas were very expensive to purchase in the US then, hence there was incentive to try to sneak other animals into the association’s system.

They would promote how great alpacas were and how much you could make breeding and selling them. But to sell a male for 3-4 grand and a female for $6-10,000 (yeah, no alpaca shit, those were the going prices around me roughly 15-20 years ago) there needs to be a market. Hence the AOBA needed to convince more people they wanted to breed alpacas as an investment since there wasn’t much money to be made from the wool. They marketed hard to the suburban hobby farms. Seemed like a legal pyramid scheme and I figured the bottom would fall out of the market at some point I couldn’t predict when the number of breeders saturated. I passed.

I could never find out if there was a thriving alpaca industry outside of the Breeders association with much lower cost non-registered animals. All the alpaca farms moderately near me were association members. The money to be made from the wool didn’t seem to justify the animal prices nor even the cost to feed them. I heard the wool was great, and it is, but I didn’t know a single person with an alpaca wool garment nor saw them in stores and wool had to compete with poor farms in Peru, yeah right. While we also hear the meat is great, folks never butchered them at those prices and reproduction is slow, far more like horses than rabbits.

I just went on line to check current prices. Oh, my, looked what popped right up on google:

Bubble Bursts On Alpaca Market. Sales Slowed, Hay Costs Doubled

Americans are using alpacas to dodge taxes, a U.S. senator warns

I’d probably skip on the alpaca thing unless you find a bankrupt breeder who wants out and you can get one for just a couple hundred bucks as a pet. But that is just my opinion.

AT

Edit, seems the AOBA morphed into a new entity:
About Alpaca Owners Association, Inc. (AOA)

Reading this I think I might have been dealing with the ARI back then and not the AOBA, but they are one in the same now.

 

Llamas
Smart
Easy on fences
Good Meat
Can Be Milked
A super Pack animal.

 

Me too and who ever wrote the article above knows nothing about the size of Alpacas v Llama.

Just means watch what you read on the Net.

 

Guinea pig's they make good food

 

SO the vote so far is
Goats - 0
Alpaca's -2
Llamas - 1
Guinea pigs -1

 

I know places around here where a "cheap" horse is 1/3 of the price of a "nothing special" goat...I have some early memories of some friends with goats, and they are assholes hellbent on beating you to death as often as they are nice, and they like to attack from the rear. Alpaca bite, sheep are generally stupid...been on this fence myself, studied it, got to know some of the locals doing it,
I would rank your list
Sheep
Alpaca
Goats
for my needs/AO...that said, I'm looking into horses and cattle to invest in in the next few years, and maybe go halves on some hogs. Heck, you can pick of 2 year old cows up for cheaper than anything on your list, and a lot of the other stuff is the same, except the minimum lot size. And I actually like horses, and they provide a lot of muscle power to some of the tasks I get into.

Rabbits also are not bad, but you need to have some backup money set aside for replacing duds, they happen.

 

Another vote for Bac,err hogs.
They are smart animals. I've always loved raising pigs. They can be cheap to feed if you can cut a deal to pick up produce trimmings and old bread from a couple of grocers. I have done this for years. Supplement that with some grain and you are GTG. 30-90 days before butchering pen them up and pour the grain to them. Will slick off all the excess fat. If left to run the property they will clear any vegetation and you will NOT have any snake problems. Plus they greatly aid in the disposal of any ruffians that may be about..

 

I have Soay Sheep. Eat like goats. Don't smell like goats. Don't climb like goats. Easy care. minimum fence 48 inches, and watch the bottom, they may try to go under. Taste like elk. Wool if you want it, but they roo, so if you are late they will scrape off the wool on the fences and trees and you won't get any. Not a milking sheep. Meat, usually about 30 pounds after butchering and I tend to debone the whole thing except the front legs. Skeleton gets pressure cooked down into usually about 6 quarts of stock to can


That said, there are sheep you can shear that don't roo. Most sheep are larger so more meat. There are dairy sheep. Some breeds are polled. What do you want the sheep or other animals to do?

It's also very important to know your climate. Not all breeds do well in every climate