Our alpacas' home is a 6-acre lifestyle block in Waimauku, about 30 minutes Northwest of Auckland. We bought the block in 2003, soon after our arrival in New Zealand. We built our own house with a seperate unit for Loraines mother had a small herd of sheep grazing the paddock.

 In 2007 we bought our first alpacas, 2 pets called Jesse and Karamba, lovely, curious and playfull, a delight to have on the farm. We then built a small shed to house our newborns and pregnant mums. Some of the alpacas really like the shed and race over as soon as a drop of rain falls.... luxury all around! Jessi also keeps an eye on our farm, and reports his findings in Jessie's Blog!

We also fenced off an area for our chickens. We really like their fresh eggs. We only have shavers they are very good layers, so much so that our daughter sells some eggs at school every week, much to the delight of her purse.

Our herd is very diverse and has been bought with a clear goal in mind: Breeding Black Suri and White Suri. This means we have two groups of alpacas:
- white suri (to breed white suris)
- coloured suri and huacayas (to breed black suris)

Have a look about  information on suri and huacaya and how to see the difference.

The white suri group started with a few 3in1 packages(this means a pregnant mum with a cria at foot). We bought the best animals we could find and that paid off, as we won several prices with them in the show ring. See our recent show results.
It is a delight to breed the white suris. They are very beautiful with their fleeces blowing in the wind, the lustre when you open their fleeces and then using the fleece afterwards, fantastic! There is a great selection of males to choose from, which makes the breeding exciting and rewarding.

The coloured group is a different story. We bought six black suri females, most of them F1's (first generation suris) and some brown and fawn huacayas with a lot of black in their background. As mentioned on the page about suris and huacayas, we still have a lot of breeding to do to increase the number of coloured suri. The starting point at this moment is still the huacaya. It takes four generations to go from a huacaya to a full suri.

We have not found the perfect black suri male New Zealand. Therefore there is a trade-off between desired traits when choosing a male. All our brown and black females have this year been mated to a homozygous black suri male, we are very curious to see the results!
Meet some of our coloured alpacas.