Business Spotlight: 'Fiber of Gold'

The state of Missouri is known for a few cash crops – chiefly soybeans, corn and hay.

Alpaca fiber is not one of them, but for Mike and Dianne Six, their agribusiness depends on it.

The Sixes own Morning Moon Alpacas, a 25-acre farm in Rogersville, where they raise nearly 70 alpacas and harvest their fiber to produce yarn for knitting and weaving. Mike Six says alpaca fleece is referred to as the “fiber of gold” in the textile industry.

“That’s what we raise them for,” he says, calling out to a gentle and friendly male named Indiana Jones. “I know every one of them.”

While they’ve only operated in Missouri for two years, the Sixes are alpaca farming veterans. They jumped into researching the small but growing U.S. industry in the mid-1990s, when Mike Six was approaching retirement from his career in telecommunications. One day in 1997, Dianne Six returned from a farm near their Virginia home to announce, “I just bought two alpacas today.”

Fifteen years later, the Sixes are working to rebuild this “retirement” plan.

“This is a second business for me,” says Mike Six, a former sales and marketing vice president managing 100 associates for now-defunct Ellypsys Technologies. “I work harder now than I did before I retired. It’s a different kind of work.”

The decision in mid-2010 to uproot the Virginia farm and move to southwest Missouri with just a fourth of their herd has the Sixes effectively starting from scratch. In the peak times, alpaca and fiber sales would net Morning Moon upwards of $200,000 per year – including a vibrant retail shop outside of Washington, D.C., to sell finished product such as scarves and sweaters – while lean times produced revenue lows of about $30,000, Mike Six says. “And the first year we moved here, we made zero,” Dianne Six says, adding 2011 finished with $25,000 in revenues and 2012 is on pace for $45,000.

Through the years, Morning Moon has averaged annual revenues of roughly $70,000, with higher profit margins in breeding and selling the animals.

Other revenue streams in the business are sales of raw and processed fiber, and knitting and weaving classes taught by Dianne Six, a knitter for 50 years. Morning Moon’s annual shearing in late April yields 250 to 300 pounds of prime fleece, which is shipped to textile mills across the country for processing.

Their preferred mill is Still River Fiber Mill in Connecticut, though after the move, the Sixes are researching others, including an Iowa mill within driving distance to control shipping costs. With access to exotic fibers, the mills can mix in bison, camel and yak fiber, or even silk and bamboo, before shipping the yarn cones or fiber roves back to the farms. “The American knitter and weaver gets bored pretty easily, so the more exotic I can make it, the better our products sell,” says Dianne Six, who telecommutes to D.C. for her project management consulting business.

Without a retail storefront – only a small home showroom/classroom and a presence on Etsy.com – fiber sales account for 30 percent, she says. Breeding represents 40 percent of revenue, and alpaca sales make up the remainder.

“That money off the fiber pays for the upkeep of our animals – vet bills, electric, shearing, food, hay, whatever the costs are – and we might make a few dollars, but it’s not enough to make a living on,” Mike Six notes. “We make a living as a breeder. We breed the animals and sell the offspring. I try to keep a foundation herd that I breed from that are good, quality stock.”

Morning Moon currently has 19 stud males, with stud fees up to $2,500 depending on pedigree. Animals for sale are priced at a couple thousand dollars up to $150,000 for an alpaca named Nobility, the prize of this herd, and Six says he’s sold 14 alpacas this year with another six projected to sell in the last quarter.

The fledgling Twin Springs Alpacas in Pineville this summer ordered six studs through Morning Moon’s breeding service – Have Stud Will Travel.

Jamie Zimmerman, who with her husband Rob manages 19 alpacas on their 40-acre farm, says before she became a paying client, Mike Six was a business mentor. Three months into launching Twin Springs – with admittedly little alpaca knowledge – Zimmerman says she called the Sixes after getting conflicting advice from a handful of veterinarians and a pile of books.

“We had a lot of questions. Alpacas are so strange and unique,” she says. “I was completely honest, I said, ‘Mike, we’re broke, I’m not looking to buy any animals, but I need some help. Can I come up to your farm and learn a few tricks?’ He said, ‘Sure.’”

A crash-course on the Sixes’ farm turned into follow-up weekly phone calls and Mike Six visiting Twin Springs on shearing day and to demonstrate proper care of toenails and teeth.

“He’s got a knack for this,” she says, crediting the Sixes with other tips such as the key traits to spot when purchasing alpacas and the top mills and yarn stores to market the fiber.

While she’s planning to buy a young female from Morning Moon, she also acknowledges that the farms are growing competitors. “We’ll be going to the same shows with him, so we’re going to compete with each other,” Zimmerman says. “At the same point, he and I and our farms hope to help each other along the way. I hope to have some studs that he’ll be interested in using – for genetic diversity, you want to breed outside your herd. They’ve really understood about putting down the boxing gloves whenever it comes to that business side of it.”

Mike Six says it’s all part of building a quality name in the industry.

“Like in any business, your reputation precedes you,” he says. “When you make a big move like we made to come out here, we had to rebuild our reputation. We’re getting that now, but it took a good, solid year.”

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