Bella Vita Ranch

Welcome to Bella Vita Ranch, home of Sunny Mesa's Tuscan Gold, El Corazon` di Bella Vita, Snowmass Alpine King, Tuscan's Proseccco and other noteworthy herd sires. Our alpacas are mainly huacayas, although we do have a small suri program. We have successfully bred for top quality alpacas, breeding for excellence in conformation as well as fleece qualities, focusing on lingering fineness and uniformity of fleece character, micron and color throughout the primary fleece. We actively show our alpacas which is good for our clients since we keep our genetics and program in the lime light. It also allows us to see and compare our alpaca breeding program to other farms across the country, honing in on our goals and tweaking our program where needed. We breed for a certain look and head style as we have discovered through the years that "cute" or "good looking" sells. But a farm has to be able to back up "cute" with substantial fleece qualities, and that does remain our primary focus. However, we cannot deny that our cute alpacas draw people to our pens at the shows. Good total fleece coverage head to foot, excellent quality fine, uniform fleeces, and a good looking overall package sum up the goals at Bella Vita. Yes, we want it all, and we have pretty much gotten it all, or at least a significant portion of it, in our program. That has meant turning down sales of certain alpacas through the years to keep them in our foundation herd and constant monitoring of the results of each year's cria crop to see what worked well and what may need a different approach. We also try to keep track of the animals we do sell to see how they do as yearlings and older alpacas in sustaining their fleece qualities and conformation. Since we have kept certain alpacas on our ranch for a number of years, we also have that data to help us with our long-term goals. The result of this longer term vision, however, are more consistent outcomes of the characteristics we value in an alpaca. And those consistent outcomes are what we can offer to our clients with some degree of certainty due to our slower approach to sales and not being willing to sell anything and everything off the ranch. I guess it can be said we have a true breeding program, not just a sales program. In other words, we are not in it just for the money. We hope to make a mark on the industry with consistent, quality alpacas, and we believe we are achieving that goal.

We have been in the business since 2003 and are willing to share our knowledge and experiences. We invite ranch visits and look forward to your interest in what we are doing here at Bella Vita, breeding the American Alpaca.

We also breed and sell Maremma Livestock Guardian dogs and are a prominent breeder in the US of these great guardians who protect our alpacas. Please visit our ranch website, www.bellavitaranch.com for pictures of and more details about these majestic dogs.