by Elizabeth Medina
Clyde lifts his muzzle and sniffs Dan Jones. Dan returns the sniff. “Sniffing to llamas is like a handshake to humans,” says Jones, owner of Spruce Ridge Llamas west of Poncha Springs. After their handshake, Jones settles a pack on Clyde’s back and prepares the llama for a short pack trip into the San Isabel National Forest.
Jones
is one of many exotic animal owners and breeders that dot the agricultural landscape
of the Arkansas Valley. Originally imported from other countries, ostriches,
llamas, and alpacas find home in the high, dry climate of Southern Colorado
to their liking.
Because these animals are easy to raise on small acreages, some exotic-animal owners and breeders rushed into the livestock business like gold miners stampeding to mining claims. And like mining, exotic animals have both boomed and busted.
In the mid-1980s, ostriches, from the ratite family of flightless birds, were booming.
“It was kind of a carpet bagger mentality. A lot of people got into the market to make money and then got out quickly. It became kind of an unplanned pyramid scheme. The first guy selling the eggs made a lot of money. Then as the seed stock market dropped out, the last guy had nobody to sell to,” says Scott Cotton, Colorado State University extension agent for range management and livestock in Pueblo County.
John Notany, a past president of the Rocky Mountain Ostrich Association, got into the business in 1991 but quit a couple of years ago. “It was too much work for too little return,” says Notany. “The market was never completely developed. We even developed our own meat label through the association, but it was difficult to get the product into the grocery stores.”
Even though ostrich meat is nutritious and low in fat and cholesterol, it never caught on in Colorado. According to Notany, the biggest demand for ostrich meat now is on the East Coast, a surprise to Notany who thought the Colorado market would be good because of its young population.
“It reached a point where you could no longer own five acres and have an incubator in your garage to make money. You had to decide if you were really in and begin raising birds on 50 to 100 acres, becoming a real livestock grower, or get out,” says Notany.
NEXT: The llama industry and why these animals
are special.
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