The great American llama (and ostrich and emu) collapse | Hacker News Reader

The great American llama (and ostrich and emu) collapse

washingtonpost.com

45 pointsbookofjoe47 comments

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

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.

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

You just described why dinosaurs are cool.

Sometimes I think the easiest path to Jurassic Park would be to try to breed really big ostriches. On the other hand it might be a better project to try to get sign language gorillas to teach other gorillas how to use sign language.

Circa 2000 my wife and I were planning to get into farming and would up visiting quite a few Llama and Alpaca farms that were frequently run by very rich retirees from corporate America. We wound up keeping horses which are a much better business because people really do want to ride horses.

I think there is a strong argument to made that cassowarys are true living dinosaurs. They're really something else. The only bird to have be reliably and repeatedly recorded as killing adult humans, including an incident in Florida in 2019 where a hand-raised one killed it's owner.

Up to 150lbs of muscle, claw, and beak, and they can stand over 6ft tall.

https://xkcd.com/1211/

> Emu on the other hand are small and relatively docile

Emus are so weirdly neurotic and aggressive, I hate being around them. If an Ostrich is even more unpredictable than an Emu it's hard to imagine farming them would even be possible.

I quite like Emu I've not seen them being aggressive towards people. Some of them are just not frightened of people so they'll come towards you, and if they think you have some food... But the ones I've met have been pretty gentle, eat out your hand. Neurotic and unpredictable: I think they're just really stupid.

If I had a bit more land I'd quite like to have some Emu. I like them and my mother is scared of them so I see only positives.

My wife and I did a drive-through Safari park thing in Arkansas a few years back. You get a bag of feed each and can feed anything that's allowed to approach cars, including emu.

There's one spot where there's a bridge over what's effectively a ditch with a small creek running through it. A few emu followed us around the park, but several of them camped out on the far side of the bridge.

When I drove into the bridge, they all moved to the middle of it and boxed the car in. They wouldn't let us pass until most of them got a handful or so of food.

It was quite surreal, and I don't know that I'd enjoy trying to run a farm of large birds like that.

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.

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.

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

How? there is zero blame in the comment, merely expression personal disappointment that the thing they like isn't widely available, while simultaneously being understanding of the reasons why it isn't.

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

Now, Canada Goose meat... yum.

Seriously? We can eat the bastards and they're still pooping and blocking traffic everywhere??

Commercial harvest of them is banned, I think (Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which implements a treaty with Canada, Mexico, Japan, and Russia.)

There are various detailed federal regulations pertaining to Canada Geese allowing control in certain situations.

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-50/chapter-I/subchapter-B...

They reputedly take serious effort to cook effectively.

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...

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.

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

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?

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

They make the cutest little sweaters though

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

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!?

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)

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

I believe it's Kurtis with a "K".

> 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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

https://archive.ph/dOKEw

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.

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.

GOF?

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

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"

I've meet a man that was about to get eviscerated by a free roaming domestic emu. The bird was domesticate, docile, curious about humans, smart and a little uncanny.

Some day, his dog started a playful fight with the bird, the game got more serious and the man, worried by the dog, tried to stop it and put himself between dog and emu. The belt received the single hit so instead to have an opened belly, velociraptor style, he just had a leather belt severed in two. In a second. Really lucky man.

He got rid of the bird not longer after that. The progressive disappearing of Emus and ostriches after a peak in popularity suggest that other farmers also had the same reveal one by one.

How about giving one a hug?

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

Were you initially looking for LLM model collapse? :)

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.

Bump and dump, but with llamas.

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.

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