The great American llama (and ostrich and emu) collapse

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/03/07/llama-emu-ostrich-herds-down/

by bookofjoe • 2 years ago

45 46 2 years ago

washingtonpost.com

bookofjoe• 2 years ago

https://archive.ph/dOKEw

genman• 2 years ago

Bump and dump, but with llamas.

AnotherGoodName2• 2 years ago

Or even more to the point. Pyramid scheme. I'll sell you these eggs for $40k so you can raise them and sell their eggs for $30k and so on. The losers are the ones that get in at the bottom. We ban blatant pyramid schemes but these ones get through by obfuscating the scheme in a very minor way.

AndrewKemendo3• 2 years ago

The whole Emu and Ostrich market is interesting

My Aunt and Uncle attempted to farm Emu and Ostrich starting in ~1994 when it was “about to boom” and spent their life savings on property in rural TX to start an Emu farm with the idea that Emu oil was going to be the next big thing.

Obviously it didn’t work out and within only a few years they switched to cattle and Bison (I bought a bison that lived out its days on the ranch till it died).

I think the bottom just fell out of the Emu market, and so it was a long shot bet on commercial alternatives that consumers just didn’t buy into.

If you look at the map on the page, there’s a little dot in Texas with ostrich right near their old farm in New Ulm. I didn’t realize it was so localized!

Knowing what I know now, they were most likely caught up in what was the ag equivalent of crypto - “hopes of getting in early on a huge future market”

Seems to be a common way to lose one’s life savings

Note: Bison and Ostrich are effectively impossible to farm - the complications costs and infrastructure are just too high cause they are really hard to manage and quite dangerous

GordonS• 2 years ago

That might explain why it's so difficult to find ostrich meat for sale. It's a real shame, as ostrich meat really is absolutely delicious - it's sort of sweet, savoury, mildly gamey, beefy and chicken'y all at once! Meat has a nice grain too, making for pleasant eating.

AndrewKemendo3• 2 years ago

Ostriches are extremely powerful, dangerously fickle and unpredictable, basically a dinosaur the size of a small car

Emu on the other hand are small and relatively docile but still pretty dangerous very smart and can jump very high, so fencing is no joke.

I just dont see any upside to raising these giant birds

wyldberry• 2 years ago

One of the main reasons I try to stay remote is the spring to fall farmer's markets in the area I live. Getting Ostrich each week is awesome. Especially in the time of year I'm often finishing the last bit of shedding the extra winter weight gained. It's a drop in replacement for other red meat for many of my meals with less fat to keep the calories lower. It takes to taco seasonins really well.

nemo44x• 2 years ago

Yeah, now that you mention it I haven't seen it around the last few years. I remember it was fairly commonly on the store shelf years ago. Was fine but was expensive compared to beef and wasn't too different in many cases so I very rarely bought it.

dvh• 2 years ago

You're like the news outlets complaining that millennials don't buy diamonds and vacation homes.

pfdietz3• 2 years ago

I've had Ostrich meat once and didn't particularly like it.

Now, Canada Goose meat... yum.

anthomtb• 2 years ago

I had ostrich several times during peak Mad Cow Disease* mania.

I cannot recall appreciating it, probably because 1) its gamey flavor was a poor substitute for beef 2) my teenage palate was not appreciative of such "interesting" flavors.

But perhaps it would be worth re-visiting with semi-refined tastebuds?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopat...

forgetfreeman• 2 years ago

This explains one of the more bizarre sightings I've made on a roadtrip. Halfway from Houston to some no-name hamlet in the middle of the state I spotted an ostrich running down the opposite shoulder of the highway. A quarter mile later I spotted a dude trying to run in cowboy boots, 100 yards farther a cowboy hat on the ground, and just a little further a dually with an open livestock trailer parked at a rest stop with no driver and no livestock present.

AndrewKemendo3• 2 years ago

Yeah that’s a more common sight than you’d expect in Texas

imzadi2• 2 years ago

I think this is like cricket farming right now. A lot of hype around it being a new alternative with some environmental benefits, but the costs to get the infrastructure are so high that the meat/milk/wool/etc is too expensive for the average consumer to even consider, and why would they? If you are living paycheck to paycheck, why would you spend $12 a pound on cricket flour when you could just buy chicken? Who cares if it might be more environmentally friendly when you're just trying to survive until your next paycheck?

jpm_sd• 2 years ago

You're really getting scammed if someone convinced you there's a market for cricket wool.

imzadi2• 2 years ago

They make the cutest little sweaters though

h2odragon2• 2 years ago

Don't buy into farming something until there's at least 2 places to sell it to. nearby.

tiborsaas• 2 years ago

Were you initially looking for LLM model collapse? :)

b33j0r• 2 years ago

We should have listened to the doomsayers. Our llama-conomy has become over-taxonomic of our resources, and now we’re going to have to reboot the whole system!

We didn’t listen. We didn’t listen!! ;)

The actual topic is interesting, but yes I definitely thought the same as you.

jonah• 2 years ago

There's a fairly successful(?) and long-running Ostrich and Emu operation near where I live.

It's a tourist attraction though and they make their money charging admission and selling handfuls of food so people can feed the birds.

nytesky• 2 years ago

GOF?

When those birds peck at the food, you can see how they could pierce a scull with that speed and mass.

jemmyw2• 2 years ago

I like Emu. Sure they could do a lot of damage if they attacked you, but I've not experienced one being aggressive. They're either scared or curious and gentle. I've got a video of playing "do you get the food or do I grab the beak"

AnotherGoodName2• 2 years ago

As an Australian from this perspective the scam shouldn't have even passed the smell test.

Due to changes in land management from traditional times we have had literal plagues of emu and kangaroos. They are of least concern in terms of population. With all other species in decline these two are really taking over.

We fought a war against them to keep their numbers down (and lost!). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War

If emu meat was going to take off in the USA it would have happened already long ago from imports from Australia. Yet somehow people bought into the idea that emu's are worth a lot of money and you should breed them!?

pfdietz3• 2 years ago

As an entirely irrelevant aside:

There's a Youtube channel from Australia I watch of a guy who does heavy machining and welding in service of construction equipment. In the most recent episode (working on the boom of a crane) at one point a cute little brown snake crawls out from some metal and aggressively chases him, eventually crawling under another pile.

He calmly tells us this thing (an eastern brown snake) is the second most venomous snake species in the world, and he wonders if the much bigger mother is around somewhere.

This felt like peak Australia to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DalniFq6WHI (around 29:50)

genericpenguin• 2 years ago

Ah good ol' Curtis! Definitely a good watch if you like watching engineering with large machines (and Homeless!).

munificent• 2 years ago

and aggressively chases him

It's definitely not aggressively chasing him. Snakes are way less aggressive than the average person realizes. The problem is that we are huge to snakes. So while we're thinking, "Oh, shit! This snakes is chasing me!" The snake is thinking, "I gotta hide! Quick to these two big rocks right near me. Wait! The rocks keep lifting and moving away! I gotta get to them!"

90% of the time when someone thinks they're being chased by a snake, it's either:

1. You are between the snake and where it knows shelter is (water, cover, hole, etc.).

2. There is no visible shelter nearby and the snake thinks your legs are a place to hide.

I've spent a lot more time around snakes than most, including many venomous ones in the wild, and I've never been "chased". Snakes are small animals with very limited energy budgets. To them, you are a giant monster running on high octane fuel. All they want is to get away from you as easily as possible so they can go back to running in low power mode until prey comes along. They don't have the inclination or energy to tussle with you.

BLKNSLVR• 2 years ago

Had a brown snake cross my front yard just last week. First one I've seen on my property in the nearly-20 years I've been there, and only the second live, wild snake I've seen in my life.

Neighbours apparently see them fairly regularly.

Brown snakes generally move in the opposite direction to "where there are people", so despite being highly dangerous, paths don't cross closely unless quite unlucky (for either human or snake).

BobaFloutist• 2 years ago

I think there's kind of an easy fallacy to slip into with any sort of growing or breeding, where you see it as unique and different from other businesses because they're self propagating - it's "free" money!

It's almost like the money equivalent of a perpetual motion machine, except that it sort of does work sometimes, just not typically for a random given layman, and it's not usually worth it compared to literally any other way of making money.

rex_gallorum2• 2 years ago

If you ever get a chance, feed a whole apple to an ostrich. Watching it move down their neck is really funny.

Keeping geese taught me that this phenomenon is quite normal for birds with long necks.

h2odragon2• 2 years ago

People run "guard llamas" on mixed pastures, or with sheep and goats.

Male llama can kill dogs and coyotes and will protect a diverse herd.

They're also pasture Cassanovas that can and will talk anything into laying down with them for an unreasonably long time.

buescher• 2 years ago

Oh gosh, I have this recollection of a line like "investment opportunities so good they only get offered to dentists, like ostrich farming" in something I read a long time ago, probably the nineties, possibly the eighties. I wish I could place it.

bombcar• 2 years ago

“Only offered to dentists” would strike me as a bigger red flag than timeshares.

tithe• 2 years ago

How about giving one a hug?

https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/ostrich-hugs-offer-belgian...

The great American llama (and ostrich and emu) collapse

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