Alpacas of Cripple Creek

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At Alpacas of Cripple Creek, we raise our alpaca and grow our olives with emphasis on sustainable agricultural practices. Our farm employs solar photovoltaic for nearly 100% of our power needs. We shred rather than burn all pruning, do not till to minimize wind erosion, use drip irrigation to all trees, apply only organics pesticides to our fruit, and use the manure produced by our alpaca as an organic fertilizer.

We also believe is sustaining our community. We pay well above the minimum hourly wage to care for our alpaca herd and harvest our olives. This helps to slow down the frenetic pace of “piece rates” during olive harvest and sustain a high-quality, local, farm labor team. We also employ disadvantaged adults to label and decorate our olive oil bottles, providing meaningful work and earnings to this segment of our community.

Alpacas of Cripple Creek began in 2003 with the purchase of four pregnant females. Since then, we have built our herd to as many as 30 animals. Although our emphasis is on the breeding of the highest quality alpaca possible, we do have a preference for blacks and grays. These colors are among the rarest of the 22 natural colors found in alpaca. All of our females of breeding age have been bred with most of our new cria expected in the fall of 2008.

To achieve high quality, we have exclusively employed “outside breedings.” This provides a practically unlimited number of herd sire choices, matching each of our females to the specific stud that will improve fiber fineness, fiber density, fiber character, conformance or phenotype, and finally our color objectives.

We are quite excited about our 2008/2009 breeding program and refinement of breeding strategy. We are now introducing three, extremely high quality herd sires that will be standing at stud at Alpacas of Cripple Creek. With impeccable genetics (including the famous Hemingway), we will breed our entire herd to these very special males while they are in residence. The resultant cria are expected to be extraordinary.