With my girls return home and the arrival of Triton, I have had to rearrange many of our animals. Good pasture layout promotes efficient grazing and simplified herd management. It requires a good deal of planning: it doesn’t just happen. Every piece of land is unique and will create its own demands when it comes to laying out your pasture. Here are some considerations:

• Terrain - Is your location hilly or flat? Do you have water features, ponds or other natural features that will require special attention? Is part of your pasture low-lying such that it may collect water during the wet times of the year?
• Vegetation - Is there brush or forest?
• Climate - How might your local weather patterns impact pasture regrowth?
• Irrigation- Are you able to irrigate your pasture to lengthen your forage growing season?

Upon moving to our farm, much of the fencing and layout was already completed for us. The preexisting fencing is diagrammed below in blue. For our purposes this layout was fantastic. We essentially had three pastures available to use with a center runway and catch pen for medical exams and the like.

The red outlines represent "run-in" shelters. The run-ins are three-sided shelters with an open front for severe weather protection. The upper and lower pasture on the left of the diagram use a shared run-in with a center divider, which is situated to avoid the brunt of the winter weather here in the pacific northwest. The smaller old pasture has its own run-in, and was the farm's original pasture.



All three of the pastures connect to a center "runway." This allows for easy herding into the catch pen below. The gates allow us to easily restrict and control animal movements when needed.

The area in green is the pasture we added this summer. We spent months trying to figure out the most practical and cost effective way to fence our new pastures. We wanted to be able to provide the herd with more pasture and a greater area to roam and graze while maintaining the ease of animal management designed into the original pasture plan. The new fields would also allow rotation, giving the flexibility to permit fields to regrow and heal from communal "bathroom" staining.

The red area in the diagram above represents our barn. It has two stalls serving as run-ins that connect into our new pasture. This eliminated the need to build additional run-ins (at added expense) and allowed us to have the animals closer to our home (better supervision and increased enjoyment), and lastly saved the work of hauling the food, hay and supplies to a different location on a daily basis (time and energy savings).

We have set up an additional catch pen in one of the small fenced in areas adjoining the barn. The animals and I are still getting used to using this one and still find it easier to use the old catch pen for medical exams, haltering, toenail trimming etc... We will all adjust.

One shortcoming of the new pasture is the lack of a center runway. Ideally the runway would continue from the old pasture directly into the new pasture. This is a feature that was left out as a budgetary constraint. We will in the future to add this runway and have planned it into our new pastures. Note the aligned gates continuing through the new pastures.

To summarize, good layout design maximizes your existing pasture space. This is particularly important with small farms that one does not want overgrazed. The use of interior fence lines, multiple gates and runways facilitates the easy movement of animals from barn to pasture, and from pasture to pasture.

Next Steps

We were lucky that our original pasture was laid out so efficiently for us from the get go. It gave us a great jumping off point to continue new pasture development. If you are starting from scratch I suggest taking time to do some homework, look at other farms, and ask questions about how they decided to arrange their pastures, what has worked for them, and what has not worked as well.

There are alpaca farms nationwide (alpacanation.com) that welcome visitors and would be more than happy to share their insights on this important part of the business.