Alpaca’s are not picky eaters. Give them water, good pasture grass (we have brome with mixed natives), and hay, with some additional pellet feed once a day, and they are happy campers. I use Stillwater minerals to give them some additional nutrients. It is in a dry powdered form and I just throw a small handful on their pellet feed each evening and keep some extra in a spare feed trough for free access as needed. We were lucky because the ranch owners before us raised Texas Bison and so all the pastures have been fairly well maintained and easy to resurrect even after they moved out a year before we bought this place. The 104 acres was fenced and cross fenced into 11 pastures. We have a neighbor grazing his cattle and maintaining 60 acres for us. The 4 acres the alpacas are on have been easy enough to get into grazing shape by mowing to keep the weeds from going to seed. With all the rain we have been drenched in so far this year, the pastures have rallied nicely and the alpacas graze all day.
Food is important to us all and we are lucky to have what we need. Others who are not so lucky must rely on others to contribute to a food bank or similar resource. I have found a few websites that do not cost you anything to contribute food. Please put the links on your desktop and whenever you sign in, just take a moment to donate. I have added the links below, and if you Google “donate food” you may find other similar links.
The Hunger Site has additional links for other causes when you open it. http://www.thehungersite.com/clickToGive/home.faces?siteId=1
Free Rice donates through the UN World Hunger program. I read that some schools use this site to help teach children language skills and they see immediately their reward by their donation of rice.
