Alpaca Business Plan

Its hard not to love alpacas.  They are sweet, cute, gentle, relatively easy to maintain.  Who wouldn't want one?  The real question is, what do you do with them when you get them and can they actually make money?


Many of us had these concerns, justifyably so,especially if we expect having alpacas in the back yard will pay our mortgage.


You need to ask yourself, what do I want to do with my alpacas?  How involved do I want to be with alpacas as an industry?  Outline what your goals are and create a checklist of what you want to do with your alpacas. 


For us, in order to get our loan to start our farm, we needed to create an alpaca business plan.  We knew we wanted to be in the alpaca industry full throttle. Many do not.  Some want just fiber animals as pets and/ or to make alpaca sweaters of out occasionally.  Some love showing.  We do not, but do so because it is important to see where your breeding program is compared to the rest of the regional (and national) herd.  Do you want to make and sell products?  This was initially not in our plan, but became a large part of our business over the past 5 years.


Here are some important questions you need to ask yourself:

• ___________ alpacas
• Fencing
• Advertising and promotion
• Creation of a website
• Health supplies and insurance
• What else?

	Year 1	Year2	Year 3	Year 4	Year 4	Year 5	Year 5
Breeding Females
Females Born
Males Born
Immature Females
Females Sold
Males Sold
Total Herd

	Year 1	Year 2	Year 3	Year 4	Year 5	Year 6
Females Sold
Males Sold
Total Income						$