Munlochy Alpacas - About us

Wiltshire polled sheep. Our two cats, Sam and Rosie, complete 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.

However, our alpacas are, and always have been, our first love. This passion 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

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, and still is, heaven. And why Munlochy Alpacas? Well, that’s named after 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 miniscule number of eggs. It has to be said that this collection did not exactly fulfil our farming aspirations, even though at this stage what we knew about farming could be written on the back of a postage stamp. We knew 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 believe we have finally got what we want. Because the land is relatively steep, there is quite a lot of rough grazing (not to mention the ubiquitous gorse) and the livestock we now have are not only animals which we enjoy farming but also happen to thrive in these conditions. Apart from the alpacas, we have a small fold of Highland cattle and we also breed

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. In fact, we can honestly say that alpaca people have to be one of the most positive aspects of the industry.