Journey With Us to 213 Green Road, R D 6, Palmerston North (just off S.H. 3 at Awahuri).

What do two sisters do when their families have grown and they are seeking new challenges in life? What about going into business together?

The dream was a lifestyle block to run a Boarding Cattery and have a few alpacas to graze the paddocks. Has a cattery eventuated? No, but there are 40-50 alpacas who have "high-jacked" any other plans for now. We are even more passionate about them now than when we started early in 2003.

We began with buying medium quality animals (as we could afford) and had all males born in our first season. This led to buying a few more females and eventually our first female cria arrived late in 2004. Males continued to appear as cria then a second female was born mid 2005. From then on, we've caught up with our female births and have increased the quality of each new season's cria with the use of top quality stud males who visit each season, courtesy of Silverstream Alpacas in Christchurch, and the fact that we now have 5 high quality males of our own.

The new crop of cria look like this (see left) - much improved quality. These three are all from Silverstream sires and the total quality (including fleece) being born now is a quantum leap better than our original herd.

We weathered the 2004 flood and have had many challenging experiences along the way. The journey became more divergent with buying an established retail wool shop in Feilding early in 2006 and adding our own alpaca fibre and other alpaca products for sale (see Wool Criations). We work hard at promoting alpacas within the local community with talks given to many groups either on farm or at their venue. We also have a pen of young animals outside the shop several times a year and outside Animates Pet shop in Palmerston North twice yearly.

What next? Who knows as the potential for growth and/or spin-offs is only limited by our imaginations, cash-flow and abilities. We both work part time as well (Heather as a Career Consultant & Marg as an Occupational Health Nurse) and hope one day that won't be necessary. We are loving the journey!!

Although we had put the property on the market to move to a larger area of land, we have taken it off again for winter as we think through the pros and cons of uprooting ourselves and the animals to shift.  Happy to stay-put for now.