Welcome to Walkley Fields – a specialist stud breeding elite alpacas in the Hawkesbury District, Sydney, New South Wales.
We’re a young, forward-thinking and ambitious commercial stud.We have challenging goals, but we think it’s the right benchmark for a modern Alpaca breeder in Australia. What’s more with the results we’ve already achieved, our strong bloodlines and scientific breeding techniques we are already making significant strides. We’re aiming to significantly improve the fleece quality of our 150-strong elite herd with every single breeding cycle. Our target is to be shearing 6kg of 17-19 micron fleece with the primary fibres at least the same diameter as the secondaries (taking away the prickle factor completely). Today our better females are shearing between 4 to 5kg of 19-20 micron fleece at 99% Comfort Factor (only 1% of fleece above 30 micron) and our latest 6 month old cria produced an annualised 3.41 kg of fleece at 15.7 micron with 100% Comfort Factor.
We have invested significantly in acquiring select males and females, ensuring that they match strict criteria on density, lustre, eveness (SD), and primary fibres within 5 micron of the secondaries.
But, no matter where they come from, the selection criteria always remains the same. We carefully research the bloodline of every animal, analyse fleece weights, SRS data, AGE data, micron consistency, and pre-potency to pass on favourable traits. It’s part of our thorough, scientific approach to breeding through SRS.
Every year Walkley Fields submits all the genetic traits of each of our individual alpacas to the Alpaca Association. Genetic factors are very important in determining breeding improvement, and different alpacas vary in their ability to deliver genetic improvement to their offspring.
Developed by Dr. Jim Watts in the 1980s, SRS has been used successfully to improve fleece quantity and quality in Merino sheep and Angora goats by selecting for increased fibre density and length. If an animal grows more fibres (density) and if those fibres are longer, then it will produce more weight of fleece. The higher density also reduces the mean fibre diameter and the variation in fibre diameter of the fleece. More recently, these selection techniques have been used successfully by alpaca breeders to improve fleece quantity and quality whilst moving rapidly towards eliminating ‘guard hair’.
