Regenerative Agriculture on the Alpaca Farm

Golden Touch Alpaca Farm - Westport, MA

Updated September 25th, 2020

Can raising Alpacas save the world?

We don’t know the answer to that but we do know here at Golden Touch Alpaca Farm they are helping us implement regenerative agriculture practices to improve our farmland and soil health for future generations.

Carbon Farming is agriculture’s answer to climate change. By responsibly grazing alpaca on our pastures and spreading their composted manure across the fields, we are sinking carbon out of the atmosphere and back into the soil. The added carbon is increasing our soil’s organic content, improving its moisture management capabilities, enriching the micro-biome rhizosphere, and overall greatly improving its healthy ecosystem.

Spreading composted alpaca manure across the fields - Golden Touch Alpaca Farm - Westport, MA

Traditional large scale agriculture and fast fashion practices deplete the soil and release carbon into the atmosphere at a high rate and require the use of pesticides, herbicides, and synthetic nutrient inputs to make the land productive. It’s an open-loop system, requiring more and more synthetic inputs to maintain, and is a fundamentally unsustainable practice. 

Properly managed, grazing livestock, like our Alpaca, help sink carbon into the soil as they nibble on each blade of grass. The grass is converting sunlight and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into sugars and starches.

Alpacas grazing on the farm - Westport, MA

The act of the alpaca eating the grass causes the plant to send those converted sugars and starches into the root system. This is the plant's way of communicating with the soil food web that it’s in need of nutrients to start its regrowth process. 

While the grazed pasture sends converted carbon into the soil through its root system, the alpaca’s advanced digestive system is converting that grass into a highly sought after natural fiber.

We utilize all the fiber our alpacas produce to create a wide variety of clothing and accessories. The processing is done within the United States, keeping the carbon footprint of the textiles we produce as low as possible. 

Over the last 5,000 years, alpacas have been primarily raised for their amazing natural fiber characteristics but they also produce alpaca beans (alpaca manure) that are often referred to as black gold for its great soil amendment properties. 

Spreading composted alpaca beans, waste hay and shavings across our back pasture - Golden Touch Alpaca Farm - Westport, MA

We collect our alpacas’ manure along with bedding and waste hay to be composted and spread across the pastures periodically throughout the year.

This is one of our farm’s ways of closing the loop by taking a waste bi-product and utilizing it to sink more carbon from the atmosphere into our soil, greatly improving its overall health and productivity for future generations.

Back Pasture at Golden Touch Alpaca Farm - Westport, MA

So back to the original question, Can raising alpacas save the world?

The answer is still we don’t know, but we do know that they are helping us lower our carbon footprint, improving the health and productivity of our farmland, all while providing us with one of Mother Nature’s greatest natural and renewable fibers.