There are many reasons that alpaca fibre is so costly. First of all, fewer are alpacas than the modern foundation is an absent foundation. There are something like 350,000 alpacas in the U.S., of which are not all great. The alpaca business gauges there should be somewhere around 1 million alpacas in the U.S. full-time plant and make it nable. From a point of view, there are 6 million sheep in the U.S. with plants ready to handle sheep's fleece into yarn at around $18 per pound though handling alpaca's fleece costs around  ＄38 per pound.