We are Noelle and Howard Bennett and we own and run Munlochy Alpacas. We moved to New Zealand from the UK in 2002 and, in common with many other Brits, yearned for our own bit of space. We were fortunate enough to buy a small block about 25 kilometres south of Dunedin, in the foothills of the Maungatua and  overlooking the Taieri Plain. In real estate language, our 26 acres would probably be described as “undulating” but anyone else would call it vertical - hence alpacasonthehill.com - but to us it was heaven. And why Munlochy Alpacas? Well, that comes from the village where we used to live in the Highlands of Scotland.

Anyway, back to New Zealand. The property came complete with a motley assortment of livestock, namely two bulls (which were listed on the inventory as steers and we didn’t think to check for attachments), several fairly wild and ancient ewes together with one extremely belligerent ram and a dozen chooks whose sole purpose in life seemed to be to eat as much as possible in return for laying a minuscule number of eggs. It has to be said that this collection did not exactly fulfil our farming aspirations, even though at that stage what we knew about farming could be written on the back of a postage stamp. What we did know though was that something had to change!

Within a few months we had managed to sell our inherited menagerie - except for the chooks which we gave away - and bit by bit accumulated our own choice of animals. A very steep learning curve and a considerable amount of money later and we finally got what we wanted. Because the land was relatively steep, there was quite a lot of rough grazing (not to mention the ubiquitous gorse) and the livestock we chose were not only animals which we enjoyed farming but also happened to thrive in those conditions. Our two cats, Sam and Rosie, completed the picture. Rough grazing was not exactly high on their list of priorities, but they did want to swap the SPCA for somewhere with better hunting, and we could certainly offer them that.

Our passion for alpacas was ignited by a chance remark from a neighbour who was looking to sell two of his animals. We spent a lot of time researching the physical needs of alpacas and the potential business opportunities offered by breeding them. We did a proportion of this research on the Internet but by far the most valuable resource was visiting and talking to as many of our local breeders as we could.

More recently we have relocated, along with Sam, Rosie and the alpacas, to a less vertical piece of land which has allowed Howard to indulge his creativity and build a 36 foot yacht. To check on how that project is progressing visit to www.nzcabinboy.blogspot.com