Alpacas
Diet is a question of balance - Claire Waring looks at factors to be considered to provide the alpaca’s nutritional needs
 |
| Alpacas need access to sufficient grass acreage. They should be stocked at around 5-6 per acre on adequate pasture in summer |
THE alpaca's main food is grass but in order to keep your herd healthy you will need to supplement this, particularly for your pregnant and lactating females.
In their original home on the high alteplano in Chile, Peru and Bolivia, alpacas range widely to find their food. They will eat a large amount of forage, which provides minimal nutrition and their long gut provides slow passage of food to ensure that the maximum amount of nutrients can be extracted. Alpacas are naturally lean animals with their body condition depending on how much food is available and their physiological condition, eg, feeding a cria, keeping warm, going through pregnancy or defending/chasing females.
In the UK, most animals find themselves on relatively lush pasture all year round. Such pasture provides a high level of protein and energy. It generally has a lower fibre content than the vegetation found in South America. On the altiplano, alpacas browse on plants other than grass and will eat deep-rooted plants which give them the minerals they require. The forage they browse on in the UK does not have such deep roots and does not supply the same level of minerals. Any concentrates fed in the UK are low in bulk, have a high calorific value, contain high levels of starch and protein and usually have a high mineral content.
Thus, to give your alpacas a balanced diet, you need to make sure that grass, hay or haylage makes up 85 to 90 per cent of their intake. Alpacas do chew the cud but their digestive mechanism is different from that of other ruminants such as cows. The stomach has three fermentation chambers, with only part of the third one resembling the human stomach. It is here that the animal absorbs the nutrients provided by the breakdown of the plant fibres by fungi, protozoa and bacteria. Fermentation is anaerobic and needs to take place in a chamber which does not contain oxygen. The process needs a constant supply of raw materials (grass and water) and the production of fermentation are removed before they reach too high a concentration. The animal needs to maintain the correct acidity level in its gut in order to achieve efficient digestion. If this is not the case, ulcers can develop on the stomach lining.
As long as the animals have access to sufficient acreage of pasture during the summer, this should meet the herd's nutritional requirements. The recommended stocking rate is five to six animals per acre on adequate grazing. It is advisable to provide constant access to hay to ensure the animals eat enough fibre. They can get diarrhoea if the grass is too lush because of the low fibre, high water and excess soluble nutrient content. Because of the higher nutrition levels found in grasses in the UK, alpacas may become overweight and yet still suffer from mineral deficiency.
Although it may appear beneficial to keep alpacas on rougher grazing, remember that they do not eat docks, thistles or nettles. These are all plants which tend to be invasive so they need to be controlled in order to maintain the availability of suitable pasture for your animals.
Although it has no nutritional value, water is a vital part of the alpaca's diet. Even though the conditions on the altiplano may be dry and arid, the animals still need fresh water to survive. The greater volume of dry matter the animals consume, the greater the water requirement. Their daily water requirements amount to 5-8 per cent of their body weight so it is essential to provide your herd with a constant source of clean, fresh water, even though a certain amount of water needs will be met from eating grass. Dams which are feeding cria will need more water to replace that lost in the milk, which is 87 per cent water.
Other than water, your alpacas need energy foods, protein, fibre, vitamins and minerals. Protein is the body-building part of the diet and is particularly important for crias during growth and dams when lactating. Different feeds provide different levels of protein. If you need to know what protein level your animals are getting from grass, hay or haylage, these will need to be analysed. Typically there is more protein in new, rapidly growing grass in spring and early summer and in early-cut hay. Lupins and other members of the pea family provide more protein than cereal grains.
Generally, alpacas seem to need high levels of calcium, phosphorus, copper, zinc, magnesium and selenium. In the UK, these occur at variable levels around the country so you will need to feed a mineral supplement to ensure requirements are met. To determine which minerals need to be supplemented, you will have to have your pasture analysed. The concentrate feeds available contain additional minerals at higher levels than in other animal feeds because of the small quantities fed to alpacas.
How do you know if you have got the diet right for your alpacas? Individual animals can be weighed regularly but for those with only a few alpacas, the best method is that known as "condition scoring". When an animal has any reasonable amount of fleece on it, its body condition cannot be seen visually and it has to be felt, primarily over the loins and down the ribs. Most scales run from one to five with a score of 3-4 generally being acceptable. A score of one indicates that the animal is emaciated. There is little fat cover on the legs and the top ridge of the spine is very obvious. At the other end of the scale, five indicates an obese animal which has considerable fat cover on the rump and legs and where it is difficult if not impossible to feel the spine. The other scorings are distributed between these extremes. Each animal's score will fluctuate over the year and condition scores need to take into account its situation such as if it is feeding or if it is pregnant. It is always useful to compare animals within the herd which will identify any particular one that is "out of line" with the others and may need special dietary attention. Animals should be condition scored on a monthly basis. Scoring needs to be done regularly in order to manage the herd's nutrition properly. It is useful to get into the habit of body-scoring an animal every time you handle it.
The nutritional requirements of geldings or adult bachelor males are probably the least complicated. To calculate their requirements, take into account the water content of the feed and then provide 1.4-1.8 per cent of bodyweight, calculated on a dry matter basis.
Determining the requirements for breeding females is more complicated. If a female is lactating and feeding a cria, she needs to maintain her own body weight and also produce around 2 kg of milk each day. Generally, forage will contain insufficient minerals to provide those included in the milk and you will have to provide a supplementary feed to keep up the dam's levels of calcium, phosphorus, zinc and selenium.
Alpaca herds have a "pecking" order and will contain dominant animals. These will be allowed to feed first and when they move away having eaten sufficient, more subordinate members of the herd will tend to follow and not get enough to eat. In order to ensure that all animals in the herd get sufficient food, concentrates should be spread out, allowing about 3 metres per animal between food portions. This gives the sub-dominant animals a chance to feed at the same time as the dominant ones and not get pushed off the food. Concentrates can be given in individual shallow buckets or spread along a shallow trough. If the containers are too deep, the animals will be reluctant to feed as, because they are a prey animal, they need to maintain visual awareness of their surroundings at all times. Hay should be protected from rain or it will spoil very quickly. It can be placed in old feed bags with a hole cut in the end through which the animals can pull the fibres.
Taking time to watch your alpacas when they are feeding will show you their behaviour patterns and you will be able to identify any individual which may need special attention to make sure it is getting enough food.
Claire Waring is society secretary for the British Alpaca Society (www.bas-uk.com).
Print 
Email this 
Comment
What are these links for?
If you liked this article and would like to share it with others on the web who might be searching for good content we've made it easy for you to do it.
At the bottom of all articles, you'll see links to six sites. These sites - commonly called 'social bookmark' or 'social news' sites - have large communities of web users who share and rate interesting, useful and fun things on the web.
Clicking the links will automatically add the address of the story you are reading to one of these sites, letting you share it with others. Each site will ask you to register to share stories. Registration is free and once a member, you can store, recommend and search for stories that interest you.
More on Digg
More on del.icio.us
More on Furl
More on reddit
More on NowPublic/
More on Yahoo!
