By Brendan Buhler

Tue, Jan 29, 2008 (2 a.m.)

Steve Marcus

Shonel Balsillie of Greystone USA shows off a $4,000 manure vacuum at the Alpaca Owners and Breeders Association convention Friday at the Riviera. The machines, which start at 32 gallons and reach 211 gallons, are produced in Las Vegas.

Steve Marcus

The wool they don’t get to keep sometimes ends up in clothing, such as the hat Keley O’Donnell is making.

Steve Marcus

The fashion show portion of the alpaca convention Fiber to Fashion features clothes like this jacket and scarves.

Steve Marcus

One alpaca produces about $300 in wool each year, some of which is used to make socks like these..

Robin Alpert had enough of Kansas the first time. It’s too flat, and in the summer it’s too hot and in the winter it’s too cold. It’s too Kansas, she told her husband.

“I always told him not to even bring my ashes back to Kansas,” she says.

And now she lives, once again, in Kansas. It’s the alpacas’ fault. When she was living in Washington, they had enough land for only 18 alpacas.

“I just love my alpacas,” Alpert says, “and I moved back to Kansas to have more alpacas. And if that isn’t an endorsement of alpacas, I don’t know what is.”

She and her husband built a house, and the most important room in it is the solarium. That’s where she sits every morning to watch her alpacas amble out to pasture. There are about 50 alpacas, all told.

Alpacas are an American story, to be sure. Men and women wonder how they will brave the world and make their fortunes, and then it hits them. “Eureka! A South American camelid,” they cry out. “No, not the llama, the vicuna or the guanaco. The other one.”

Yes, the alpaca, a creature weighing about 150 pounds and standing about 3 feet at the shoulder, or withers, with a foot anda half more of neck. Padded two-toe feet, not hooves. No upper teeth in front. Sociable but sometimes inclined to spit. More to the point: excellent wool.

That’s why Robin Alpert came to Las Vegas this past weekend for Fiber to Fashion, the Alpaca Owners and Breeders Association conference and fashion show. True, it’s not a large show. Only 300 people, without their animals, registered for the convention, converging around 13 booths huddled in the middle of a vast ballroom at the Riviera. But behind these numbers lurks a growing population of alpacas — more than 100,000 so far and more than 4,000 owners. It’s a herd that, unlike the nation’s 6.3 million sheep, is growing.

There is talk in publications such as The Wall Street Journal that the alpaca economy is a bubble, like earlier llama and ostrich bubbles. The bubble argument goes like this: Alpacas sell for $20,000 on average and produce maybe $300 in wool a year, not enough to cover the cost of raising the animal over its 20-year lifespan, so the only way to make money is to breed and sell alpacas and take advantage of agricultural tax breaks, and that will work only for as long as people think an alpaca is worth $20,000 or more. The alpaca industry counters that it is focused on improving breed lines and increasing demand for alpaca wool. But for our purposes today, never mind.

For alpaca owners, it’s as much love as business.

“The animals themselves are just life-changing,” Alpert says. They’re friendly and they love children, she says. Her affair with alpacas started 11 years ago when she met and bought her first alpaca, a 1-year-old male named Silver Bullet. She hopes he’ll live past 20, far longer than he’d live in Peru, with the help of good feed and medical care. “They are just pampered something fierce by most of us.”

And she says, as a bonus, that compost alpaca dung makes a great fertilizer that “just pops up plants.”

Speaking of dung, there were two people at the show likely to do well, alpaca bubble or no. Scott and Shonel Balsillie of Las Vegas run Greystone USA, which makes and sells pasture vacuums. The vacuums start at 32-gallon, $1,600 models and go up to 211-gallon, $4,000 models. The large blue contraptions can be pulled around pastures by riding lawn mowers or all-terrain vehicles, and have a large gray hose that sucks up manure.

The vacuums, Scott Balsillie notes, can pick up any animal’s manure, not just an alpaca’s.