The great American llama (and ostrich and emu) collapse

The ag census has been tracking the most important weird farm animals — bison, deer, elk, llama, emu and ostrich — only since 2002. We missed the wild and woolly 1990s, when a breeding pair of ostriches or emus sold for $40,000 or more — as did a decent llama — and their populations soared. But the feds started keeping track just in time for that to all go up in smoke.

From 2002 to 2022, we lost 83 percent of our ostriches, 79 percent of our llamas, 74 percent of our emus and 63 percent of our elk. Over that period, cattle were down just 8 percent, poultry was up 16 percent, and hogs were up 22 percent.

When we rooted around for explanations, we found answers focused on individual species. For example, the ostrich mania of the late 1980s coincided with massive sanctions imposed in 1986 (over President Ronald Reagan’s veto) on apartheid South Africa, the galaxy’s undisputed ostrich superpower.

American ostrich insurgents raced to fill the gap. But just as they clawed out a toehold, apartheid fell. The South African ostrich machine roared back to life, and the American ostrich bubble popped. A pair of Florida birds that fetched $28,000 around 1994 sold for $10 just five years later, according to the Tampa Tribune. According to the 1999 book “Dreambirds,” some birds may simply have been released into the Arizona desert, where, regrettably, they failed to establish a feral population. (The same would happen later in Texas with emus.)

But these ostrich explanations aren’t enough. Other exotic species peaked in popularity around the same time, and Afrikaners aren’t known for llama or elk husbandry. Factors other than sanctions over apartheid must have inflated these alternative-animal bubbles.

Our thoughts went first to the fortunes of small farms. The average owner of these oddball animals has 15 ostriches, eight emus or five llamas. By contrast, folks who own cattle have an average of 120. For hogs, it’s 1,214.

And midsize farms keep disappearing. The number of farms between 50 and 499 acres has fallen 27 percent since 1997. But that’s not nearly as big of a drop as the decline in exotic animals. The number of the smallest farms, those with less than nine acres, has actually risen as hobbyists and tax-break aficionados discover the joys of morning chores and the demand for locavore cuisine.

There was, in fact, a massive collapse in smaller American farms, but it happened between 1940 and 1980 — before the populations of exotic animals surged.

Then we noticed a trend that made us reconsider the small-farm theory. In a 2000 profile, our Washington Post colleague Dana Hedgpeth described the 21-year-old president of the Maryland Emu Association as wanting “to get into it to save the family farm,” according to her mother. A 1995 Greensboro News and Record article bears the headline: “Ostrich: Fowl may save the family farm.” That same year, an emu farmer told the La Crosse Tribune in Wisconsin that “this is a way to get the family farm back.”

So maybe the decline of small farms helped boost exotic animals — but not in the way we thought. America lost 4 million farms in four decades. Maybe a few thousand of those displaced farmers, in their desperation, saw llamas and their ilk as living lifelines? That alone could explain the numbers we’re seeing.

But Rich Sexton expressed some skepticism about our theory. Sexton and fellow University of California at Davis ag economist Tina Saitone had the unusual honor of calling one of these bubbles before it burst, writing a 2007 paper, “Alpaca Lies? Speculative Bubbles in Agriculture,” as the market for the llama’s camelid cousin soared.

Furious alpaca acolytes dismissed Sexton as an undergrad marketing student and a “disgruntled alpaca inseminator from Florida.” But Saitone and Sexton had called the top of the market. Alpaca armageddon ensued.

So Sexton had a front-row seat to one entire weird-animal hype cycle. We don’t have as much census data on alpacas, but speaking to Sexton helped us unlock what was going on more generally. His objection to our farm-crisis theory was simple: The target market for these exotic animals wasn’t experienced stockmen and women. It was rubes.

Sexton got sucked into alpacas when he saw a late-night TV commercial from an industry association. The voice-over urged retirees to open a ranch, and their wallets, and “wake up to the wonderful work of alpacas” — which to Sexton, a tree-crop and almond expert, among other things, sounded nuts.

Farmers have formed dozens of associations, but they always market their products — i.e., cheese — not their livestock. If the dairy council urged outsiders to buy cows and build competing herds, its members would revolt. (In fact, during this era, dairy farmers did the opposite. They paid their peers to slaughter their herds and get out of the business.)

As in any investment strategy shaped like a pyramid, exotic-livestock schemes rely not on selling such animal products as milk, eggs, wool, meat or leather, but on selling the animals themselves to a new sucker. And if any of these alternative animals truly had substantial market value, the “smart money” of big agribusiness would have swooped in and turned them into literal cash cows.

“Organic foods are a great example of that effect,” Sexton told us. “Organic started out as a very niche-type business — small-scale operations selling largely at farmers markets and roadside stands. But there was real value in organic, at least to certain consumers, so as the market grew, the big players moved in.”

That did not happen with emus. So, according to Sexton, the classic mark for these dubious investments probably would have been a couple who had just retired or moved to the country and had a few extra acres burning a hole in their pockets. For this “dumb money” theory to hold water, we would expect to have seen these outsiders pour into farm country in the 1990s.

Did we?

We asked Ken Johnson at the University of New Hampshire. Johnson made his name as a lead chronicler of the “rural rebound” of the 1990s, along with Agriculture Department legend Calvin Beale, “the Michael Jordan of rural demography.”

“It was a time of deconcentration as retirees, white-collar workers and other disenchanted city dwellers streamed out of dense urban cores and into suburbs, small towns and rural areas,” Johnson said. “They all wanted the rural lifestyle.”

When we looked at counties with the most ostriches in 2002 — peak ostrich in our data — those counties typically had grown about twice as fast as their ostrich-free neighbors in the preceding decade. The pattern with emus and llamas was nearly as striking. On the other hand, places with the most boring Old MacDonald-class livestock tended, if anything, to have slower population growth.

The late 1990s had just the right mix of desperate farmers and relatively rich rubes. But we’d seen similar conditions during the rural revival of the 1970s. Why didn’t alternative animals boom then?

We thought we’d found the smoking gun in a 1996 Wall Street Journal feature about an exuberantly seedy exotic-animal auction in southeastern Missouri. “In the late ’70s, the government loosened regulations on captive breeding, and zoos began selling their surplus animals into the auction market,” Lynn M. Ermann wrote.

But animal-law experts tossed cold water on this theory. We called a small army of them, and none thought those regulations had much bearing on exotic-livestock fads.

Kathy Hessler, assistant dean for animal law at George Washington University Law School, pointed instead to a lack of regulation and to broader cultural shifts in how Americans thought of animals. With the rise of commercial agriculture, she told us, “we have these industrial settings where we’re not confining ourselves to treating these animals the way they would need to be treated in nature. We’re now treating them much more like a widget, a true commodity.”

At the close of the greed-is-good 1980s, commodities meant investing. And investing usually meant speculation.

Lawyer Lowell Baier, a legal and environmental historian and author of several books on conservation and the Endangered Species Act, said changes in regulation probably played no role, adding: “It was pure greed and capitalism that drove the market up.”

Baier would know: His brother Alan Baier has spent more than five decades running an exotic-animal ranch on Colorado’s Western Slope. Alan, who still raises elk and bison at age 81, had a front-row seat to the entire fad.

Well, sometimes he preferred a middle-row seat. The seat, in any case, was at the exotic-stock auction he still likes to visit every month.

Alan made some money in ostriches, but nothing like some of the big exotic-animal dealers, at least one of whom he said bought a whole new spread in Texas with big-bird money. During the boom years, Alan watched every month as cadres of savvy bird brokers would spot new money the instant they walked in and bid up prices accordingly.

“Those people are masters at ripping people off,” Alan told us.

Higher prices kicked off a feedback loop. More dumb money flowed in as friends and neighbors worried about missing out on the ostrich-and-emu game. That pushed prices up further.

Because animals take time to breed and rear, the market didn’t burn itself out as quickly as most investment fads. It built slowly, allowing fresh rounds of new rural residents to convince themselves that it made sense to pay $40,000 for an emu.

Until, at last, it didn’t.

Hi! The Department of Data is on a quest for queries. What are you curious about: What farms get the most government support? Can we map the Bible Belt? What about the Torah or Quran belts? What are the most-British words? Just ask!

If your question inspires a column, we’ll send you an official Department of Data button and ID card. This week, we’ll send one to the Pew Research Center’s Jenn Hatfield and economist Matt Suandi, both of whom suggested regulation might play a role in the rise and fall of weird farm animals. We should also send one to news researcher Alice Crites, who dug deep into zoo sales to exotic-animal dealers. To be alerted as soon as we publish a new column, sign up here!