Hay is the bridge beyond pasture
When pasture is dormant, grazed down, or buried under snow, hay becomes the whole diet for both species — and both are built to run on it. Grass hay is the everyday choice: sound, sweet-smelling, and free of mold and dust. Sheep do well on good grass hay with some legume in the mix, while alpacas, famously efficient converters of rough forage, thrive on plainer grass hay that richer-fed animals would find lean. Feed from racks or bunks that keep fleeces and fiber clean and reduce waste, and make sure timid animals at the bottom of the pecking order actually get their share — in a mixed group, the quiet sheep or alpaca at the edge is the one whose intake needs checking.
Minerals: where sheep and alpacas part ways
This is the point where a shared pasture stops meaning a shared diet. Sheep are uniquely vulnerable to copper: levels that goats or cattle need will accumulate in a sheep's liver and can kill. Sheep minerals are therefore blended with no added copper, and sheep should never have access to another species' mineral or feed with copper added. Alpacas have their own mineral needs and should have a mineral appropriate to them, offered free choice alongside plain salt. If sheep and alpacas run together, the mineral station has to be planned around the sheep's copper limit, and any separate supplement for the alpacas needs its own arrangement. Fresh water, kept from freezing in winter, completes the picture.
When concentrates are actually justified
Grain and pelleted concentrates are precision tools for specific seasons of life. Ewes in the last stretch of pregnancy, especially those carrying twins, often cannot eat enough hay to meet demand and benefit from a measured concentrate ration. Nursing mothers and growing lambs have the same claim, as do alpacas in late pregnancy, nursing mothers, and a young cria still putting on frame. Outside those windows, healthy adults on good hay rarely need concentrates at all, and routine grain feeding causes more harm than good — fat sheep with dull fleeces, and wethers and castrated males at risk of urinary stones when rich rations skew their mineral balance. Every concentrate addition should also be gradual, spread over days, so rumens can adjust.
Two different appetites under one fence
Alpacas extract more from less than almost any other barnyard animal, so the classic alpaca feeding error is kindness: rich hay and generous concentrates produce fat alpacas whose condition hides under a full fleece until hands-on checking reveals it. Sheep sit somewhere in the middle — more forgiving than alpacas of a richer ration, but still forage animals first. Feel for condition through the wool or fiber, over the spine and ribs, on a schedule, because eyes alone cannot judge either species in full coat. Weight that creeps on over a winter is far easier to prevent than to remove from animals designed to store it.
Reading the whole group, season by season
Beyond pasture, the feeding year has a rhythm: hay quality varies by cutting, pasture returns in flushes, pregnancy and nursing redraw the ration for part of the flock, and shearing reveals true condition in a way that resets everyone's assumptions. Walk the group weekly, hands on backs, and adjust in small steps. Keep the standing rules where every feeder can see them — which hay for which group, the sheep-safe mineral only, who earns concentrates this month and why — in KinsLe Care Teams, so the sheep never meet the wrong mineral bag and the alpacas never meet a second helping they did not need.