Alpaca Diet

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Jill Bergman and I'm going to talk to you today a little bit about what kind of food that Alpacas need. What I have here is a sample, it's called Grass Hay. There might be a little alfalfa in it, but probably not too much of it. They can't consume too much protein and alfalfa has a lot of protein in it. So what we do is we try to find the best hay that, Grass hay it's called Grass Hay, that we can find, and I actually get this out of Moroni. It's really fine, nice and green and it's got moisture in it; it's really a wonderful Grass Hay. Ok, this is something else that we feed them. This is their winter feed, actually, and what I have in here are these pellets that were devised by a fellow down at BYU, Todd Robertson, and fortunately he's very close and they did such a good job. I give them alfalfa pellets in the winter as well. And then in here is something we call cob, which is corn, oats and barley with a little bit of molasses that's mixed into it, and that's their winter feed. The reason we feed them this in the winter is they don't get quite the nutrients that they get when they're eating the grass in the pasture. So along with this we give them something called fiber nutrients. And fiber nutrients are mixed up by a fellow out of Ohio, a Dr. Evans, and these fiber nutrients help them have, keep their fiber lustrous and healthy, and strong; you want strong fiber because if you don't have strong fiber, you get what's called fiber breaks. That's impossible to process. Then another thing, probably that I should mention, is that we have to give them minerals, and we give them three minerals, which means we don't limit them on the amount of minerals that they can eat. We keep them in buckets and they eat as much minerals as they want, and with those three things we, hopefully, keep our Alpacas fairly healthy."