A face to fall in love with

by Tara Nelson

Linda Bylsma was in the waiting room of her doctor’s office when she found the answer she was looking for. It came after she spent more than 30 years working in the title insurance industry.

Bylsma, who owns Lost River Alpaca Ranch, was looking for a way to make a transition into living on a 40-acre Nooksack farm she and her husband Alan inherited from his parents.

That was before she found an advertisement for Peruvian alpacas, a South American camelid closely related to llamas, in the back pages of Sunset magazine.

“It read, ‘the investment you can hug,”’ she said, adding, “I spent my life with a phone glued to my ear problem-solving and trouble-shooting. And then I met alpacas and I began to mellow out.”

After a few interviews with local breeders and a year of research, the couple was convinced they could make a living raising alpacas. So in 1998, they bought six animals - four huacayas and two suris - from local breeders, which they kept at a boarding ranch in Ferndale.
Alan’s parents, Foppe and Edna, purchased the property in 1949 to produce row crops, eventually converting the farm into a small dairy operation when several of the local canneries went bankrupt. Bylsma said she and her husband were inspired partly by Foppe’s mid-life career change when they made their own transition.

“The canneries would go out of business and he wouldn’t get paid for the crops he would grow for them,” she said. “So it was very inspirational to us that his dad had changed his career at the age of 40 without any money in the bank. That was one of the key decision-making factors. It was a risk, but it’s working, it’s paid off.”

In 2001, Linda quit her job as vice president of a title insurance business in Seattle and moved to Nooksack full-time to take care of the animals. Alan, meanwhile, continued to work in Seattle, dividing his time between the farm and a small engineering firm.

“I knew nothing about farming,” Linda said. “It probably took us five years before we got to the point where we were getting the quality that we wanted. But now I think I was meant to live on a farm. When I met Alan and he brought me up here, I thought I was going to live here someday. Everybody around here just laughs, because me the city girl, the only pet I ever owned was a cat. Now I’m raising livestock. And I’m working my tootie off but I love it.”

A ‘mellow’ animal
Alpacas are smaller and better tempered than their llama cousins. With their large eyes, luxurious coats and shy demeanor, alpacas have an almost ethereal presence about them.

“They’re like cats with their demeanor,” she said. “They’re extremely smart and curious and yet independent. They only socialize as much as they want to.”

The males are a bit more mischievous, she said.
“It’s like having a bunch of six-year-olds around,” she said, recalling seven-year-old Baby Ruth, a fluffy brown huacaya known to take hats off and untie shoes.

Bylsma, however, eschews the myth that alpacas are hostile, spitting beasts. She added that she was disappointed by a recent episode of “The World’s Dirtiest Jobs” on the Discovery Channel that featured spitting alpacas.

“It couldn’t be farther from the truth,” she said. “Being around them is almost meditative. They’re such a mellow animal, there’s something very relaxing about their presence. It seemed like they were going out of their way to make the alpacas spit.”

Bylsma said alpacas usually only spit when they’re mad, and usually at each other when fighting over food or territory.

“Very rarely do they spit at us because we treat them with respect,” she said. “Usually, if I get spit on it’s because I’m standing in between two of them and there’s food involved.”

Although alpacas have been domesticated for thousands of years in the Andean mountains of Bolivia, Chile and Peru, they were only introduced to the United States in 1984.

Since then, they have become a speculatively profitable business with low maintenance and feeding costs and offering high returns for breeding stock.

A 2006 study by the Agricultural Issues Center of the University of California found the average price of alpaca breeding stock in the United States is approximately $25,000 per head, many times higher than prices obtainable in Peru.

Softer than cashmere
Bylsma said another benefit to raising alpacas is their fiber, which is shorn once a year and sold to a fiber cooperative.

“It’s not an animal you’re raising to butcher,” she said. “You have a very luxurious end product that is very marketable.”

The Bylsmas raise two types of alpacas - huayacas (pronounced wa - kaya) and Suris. Huayaca alpacas, with their short, crimped hair and trademark “teddy bear” look, account for approximately 80 percent of the fiber produced in the United States. But the most sought after fiber comes from the Suri alpacas, which produce long, straight locks of luxurious fiber.

The average alpaca produces anywhere from six to eight pounds of fiber per year. Prices for alpaca wool are determined by the micron count and the type of alpaca producing the fiber. The smaller the micron count, the finer and more valuable the fiber.

Alpaca fiber is softer than cashmere and stronger than wool, Bylsma said. It’s also lighter than wool because of the fiber’s hollow core. The Bylsmas have recently converted a 3,000-square foot barn into a shelter and the old milking parlor Alan’s dad once used is now a storage facility for the portion of fiber Linda keeps for her own projects.

The rest of the fiber is sold to the Alpaca Fiber Cooperative of North America (AFCNA) a collaborative of U.S. and Canadian alpaca farmers for which, she receives a credit to buy back some of the yarn. Because of a lack of alpaca fiber processing facilities in the United States, Bylsma said the cooperative sends its fiber to South America to produce yarn, even though shipping costs are significant. From there, Bylsma said she orders yarn at a wholesale price to U.S. clothing manufacturers to make sweaters, scarves and hats, which she sells at the farm store.

She also sends some of the fiber to mini mills across the country, such as Twisted Sisters Fiber Mill, in Nisku, Alberta, the owner of which is a client of Bylsma.

“There is so much to do with this fiber,” she said, adding that she holds regular felting classes year-round. “I want to be knitting, spinning, felting, all the time, which keeps me out of trouble.”

For more information about Lost River Alpacas, write to P.O. Box 4156, Nooksack, WA 98276, or visit www.lostriveralpacas.net. The farm is located at 601 W. Third Street, Nooksack (three blocks west of Highway 9) and will host an alpaca handling class for owners and breeders on October 7, as well as an open house the first Saturday in December. The open house will include farm tours, refreshments and hourly door prizes. Admission is free. For more information about the handling class or other events, call 966-5763. Store is open from 1 to 6 p.m., Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays or by appointment. Tours are also available by appointment.

Additional information on alpacas is available on the Alpaca Owners and Breeders Association web site at www.aoba.org.