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.

As you can see from our farm visitor map (below and to the left), we have been overwhelmingly lucky to have lots of company here on the farm. Now with a slight summer lull I am back on-track with some blogging.

Since our arrival, it has been a priority to improve our pasture situation. Having adequate and properly laid out pasture space improves and maintains not only herd health, but also eases farm management and maintenance (i.e. saves my labor!). A first consideration is how many alpacas you expect to have on your farm.

Animal Density

Many of the resources and breeders I have researched and spoken with suggest that one can house 5-10 animals per acre. In my opinion, ten animals is not a reasonable expectation unless you live in an area where your forage is very fast growing, have enough pastures to rotate frequently, and have an adequate means to irrigate to ensure forage regrowth.

Rotational grazing poses additional work and upfront expense to the farm owner. Not only is it time consuming to constantly move your animals, but it is also expensive to put in. Rotational grazing requires the use of interior fence lines and multiple gates to allow you to move the herd from one pasture to another so the previous pasture can be allowed to grow without grazing. A more reasonable estimate may be on the low end at five alpaca per acre, and even this may be too many if you live in an area that the forage doesn’t grow year round due to either winter weather, or summer heat and dryness.

Layout

How many separate pastures does one need? Most say least two -- one pasture for males - and - one for females. However, we have been doing breedings on our farm for next season, and I can attest to the need for at least three. I have found that having at least one pasture (or at a bare minimum a runway) between the sexes alleviates squabbles between the breeding males vying for attention from the females. It also provides space for said breedings and any needed animal care work. An additional two pastures would be ideal to separate out the male and female weanlings so they do not have to compete with the adults for food and rotational fields are available for pasture maintenance and forage regrowth

Having just put in additional fences for my farm, I still have upfront costs strongly on my mind! One solution we have found to temporarily remedy this challenge is to use portable fencing to break up larger pastures into smaller units which can be used for rotation or weanling separation.

Keep in mind that catch pens are also necessary for breeding, herd health, and training. I will include and entry in the near future about what layout we have found to work for us and share layouts that I have observed at other farms.

Stay tuned for more articles on this subject coming up!