This doesn’t mean breaking your back in the fields all day. A herd of just half a dozen alpacas could do the trick nicely. All you’d have to do is check up on them twice a day, keep them safe from predators (including the family pooch, which apparently has a taste for alpaca meat) and clip their toenails every couple of months.
Absurd? Not necessarily. According to the British Alpaca Society (BAS), there are now 21,000 of the animals in the country — not bad going, as the first ones were brought over from their native South America only in the mid-1990s — but the suspicion is that their attraction for breeders lies as much in the way they can be used to circumvent planning rules as in the llama-like creatures’ innate charms.
With most farm animals, you need to keep hundreds (or thousands, in the case of chickens) before you can persuade the planners that you need to build a home to live alongside them on your land. But because alpacas are expensive — breeding females sell for £5,000 and stud males for as much as £30,000 — a handful may suffice.
“We are aware that people are trying to get planning consent by purchasing alpacas, but it is not something we encourage,” says Libby Henson, of the BAS, which has seen its membership more than treble in the past five years, from 300 to 1,100. She admits, however, that most members are not full-time breeders and typically have a herd of 20-30 animals.
Under the rules, all a would-be alpaca farmer needs to apply for permission to build a house is a handful of animals and a business plan. If the planners deem this viable, they will grant temporary planning permission — valid for three years, though a mobile or wooden home is usually specified. At the end of that period, they review the business to establish whether it is a genuine commercial concern — which normally means a herd of 35 or so alpacas.
In theory, anyone failing the test can be ordered to remove the property. How often — if at all — this happens is not clear. “It is fairly unlikely they’d check properly, and it would be pretty difficult for them to prove your business wasn’t going well,” says David Hill, a land agent for Savills estate agency. “Usually the way people get found out is if a jealous neighbour complains — the councils aren’t overly proactive. After 10 years, you would get full ownership rights anyway, whatever the conditions of the planning permission.”
Garry and Andrea Naish. New to farming, the couple from Bristol put six alpacas on their six acres in Wickwar, South Gloucestershire, in 2005 and were granted temporary planning permission for a mobile three-bedroom home. Neighbours accused them of manipulating the system and turning their land into a “shanty town”.
After three years, they had built up a herd of 30 animals and were making a profit — so they were given permission to build a permanent home, which they now intend to do. “It was not my intention to go into alpaca farming full time at first,” Garry says. “It was just a nice project for my wife. But it’s been a labour of love for both of us.”
Source: The Times
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