Alpacas Ate My Loganberry

Two visits to Greenbank Farm on Whidbey Island in the Puget Sound left me perplexed about one thing: Alpacas. The farm is a historic landmark on the island, overhauled a few years ago to encourage agrarian entrepreneurs to continue producing goods by creating a marketing outlet for the resulting produce. A community garden is located at the farm. You can pick your own Loganberries. And there are about a dozen Alpacas grazing in pens located on farm grounds.

Alpacas look like odd lamas in a Muppet-cute sort of way. At a recent gathering of geeks in San Jose, I got the skinny on why this may be one of the hottest livestock properties in modern farming. It seems Firefox Evangelist Asa Dotzler is a future farmer of Alpacas, with plans to retire to an Alpaca farm somewhere in the Pacific Northwest as soon as he succeeds in dominating the browser space with Mozilla's upstart alternative to IE.

As I learned from Asa, Alpaca breeding stock isn't cheap, at $25,000 for a pregnant female. The appeal is the amazingly soft fur, which rates in the 10-12 micron category, several times softer than the standard sheep wool used for the common suit coat. An annual shearing is good for several thousand dollars on a few hundred dollars of feed (or so several online sites suggest).

While this is intriguing, I don't think it's for me. The idea of spending $25k on something that could die due to any number of environmental variables, like disease or mountain lion attack, seems like more risk than I'm willing to bear. I'll leave it to Asa and other brave souls to sell materials for the latest styles from Armani. Or until I decide I hate tech too much to continue with digital audio and video.

Posted by Jake

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Alpacas Ate My Loganberry

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