Pittsboro Real Estate Broker Eric Andrews discusses something he knows well: Alpaca Farms. If you’re thinking of opening an Alpaca Farm you may find this interesting.
Speaker 1: Can you have an alpaca farm in Chatham County?
speaker 2: You can have an alpaca farm in Chatham County. Probably one of the… So I’ve been involved with two of them. I did a subdivision in the Bear Creek area called Mayfield. I named it after where my grandfather grew up. And so that was a 12 lot subdivision and I made sure the covenants, they were pretty loosey-goosey and we had some clients come down from New York and they’re raising alpacas, one of the back ends of the cul-de-sacs and they utilized the wool. They’re also, this guy makes very nice wooden boxes or whatever, but they’re just good people that have moved here from the north and they had a dream to raise alpacas.
Then I had another client that had no idea what his ambitions were, but Marty Rainer has an alpaca form. It’s halfway between Pittsburgh and Siler City on 64, you can’t miss it. It is an amazing facility. He actually has quite a few alpacas there, but he also has a retail center there and we just put his house under contract in Chatham Forest and he’s building a house behind the facility right now. But I mean, it is a beautiful facility. He does tours. He was a guest. Well, his staff were guest speakers at our rotary club here in town. You know, that agritourism is really big and they’re utilizing the wool and they’re shearing the wool and they’re sending it off to facilities to have it processed and they’re blending it with other wools and everything.
And then the other thing that is a big market, there’s market for the alpaca meat market. But there’s just… Currently right now in North Carolina, there’s nobody to process it and it’s not considered a livestock animal yet, but I know some of the alpaca farmers in the area are working on making it licensed as a livestock animal so the meat can be processed. Never had it myself.
So, there’s a couple of them around and one of the things that I really love about this area is that we have the ag extension and we also have North Carolina State, which is an amazing resource. There are tons of students and grad students that will evaluate the soils, tell you what the pasture needs, what the llamas need, what the llamas need to thrive, what they need in their water, their minerals. It’s just really a great resource to have NC State just down the road. But yes, there are alpaca farms in Chatham County.
