Rainbow Pacas is a small alpaca farm situated on an historic property off Route 109 in Poolesville, Maryland. Our alpacas live right outside our door in sheds we built ourselves. The fields they graze on were once cornfields, planted now with orchard grass, reclaimed from the farmer who had been renting the land to grow crops. We build fences and add shelters as we need them. Next spring we may be nearly doubling our herd with a potential nine new babies (called crias). That’s a lot to us, but nothing to the big farms where they might have thirty or forty or over a hundred crias every spring and/or fall.
We started raising alpacas in 2003 after a chance encounter with some “fleece males” that live down the road. Alpacas grab you or they don’t: I got grabbed. They are funny-looking, Dr. Suess creatures, gentle and inquisitive, opinionated and shy, with large, dark, beautiful eyes. They hum. They say a lot with head and ear gestures and body language. When frightened or alarmed, they scream loud enough to jerk you out of a sound sleep. Just after shearing they bear a striking resemblance to E.T. as they bound across the field liberated from their hot, thick fleece.
The fleece of huacayas – the type of alpacas we own – is soft and fluffy, very crimpy, fine and dense. The other type of alpaca, called suri, have long silky fleece that curls like dreadlocks. We are huacaya people, but suris are pretty neat-looking. All our animals are always for sale, though it is always hard to part with them. We do not go to shows, so our prices are not super high. Our animals have excellent conformation and “very decent fleece” we are told. That means they are good basic animals on which one could build a herd with the right breeding.
