Listening to the Animals

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A chance encounter with an alpaca transformed Lee Rankin’s life.

Twenty-four years ago, Lee Rankin was pushing her son Will in a stroller, wandering around the animal barn at the Kentucky State Fair, when she found herself eye-to-eye with a fawn-colored alpaca.

“I had never seen one before,” Rankin says. “And literally, the whole room disappeared. It was just me and this alpaca. I was like, ‘That is the coolest animal I’ve ever seen.’”

After a brief conversation with its owner, Rankin knew she wanted to raise the woolly animals on a farm in the mountains.

“I was unphased by the fact that I had no experience,” she says. “I had fallen in love with an alpaca and that’s what I was going to do.”

A quarter century later, Rankin, a recent cancer survivor, cares for 20 alpacas, along with llamas, donkeys, Angora goats, a Zebu cow, pot-bellied pigs, horses, Great Pyrenees dogs and chickens on her 43-acre Apple Hill Farm in Banner Elk, North Carolina. From May to October, she opens to the public for guided tours, shearing days, goat yoga and more.

Growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, and later splitting her time between her hometown and a former dairy farm in the Catskills of New York, Rankin had always loved animals.

“I rescued every baby bird, baby squirrel, kittens, everything, when I was a kid, much to my parents’ chagrin,” she says. “I probably would’ve been a vet or an animal trainer if I had been better at school.”

Instead, she attended the Culinary Institute of America in Poughkeepsie and wrote a cookbook. In 1998, two years before her surprise encounter with the alpaca, she’d done a signing at the old Hemingway’s bookstore in Blowing Rock. So when she made up her mind to move to the area and raise the cuddly South American mammals, she rented a cabin for a month with her toddler and their golden retriever while she looked at potential sites.

“The whole time I was here, it was like, ‘If it’s the right thing to do, I will find a piece of property I can’t say no to.’”

One in particular came with a move-in-ready house, plenty of land, and a stunning view at the top of an abandoned apple orchard and Christmas tree farm in Banner Elk.

“You can see all the way to Boone,” she says. “You can see the windmill at App State. And you can see the mountains in the distance.

“It was bigger than what I wanted, but I kept comparing everything I saw to this. It was more land, more money, more everything. But it just felt right.”

Rankin founded Apple Hill Farm in 2003 and acquired her first three alpacas—two pregnant females and a bottle-fed cria (baby) named Millie—from a neighbor who was moving.

“And the next morning,” Rankin says, “one of them gave birth and it was a girl. The owner had no idea she was due that soon. She thought it was like two or three weeks away.”

More pleasant surprises followed. The real estate agent’s husband offered to help her design and build the barn and, Rankin says, “There were other things that just fell in my lap.”

She and her son began showing Millie at alpaca shows.

“We would put her in the back of our Subaru,” Rankin recalls. “She went to town. She’d go to the bank. And we decided that we needed to be more ‘farmy’ about it and get a trailer and a buddy for her to travel with. So from the same farm we bought a male named M.J., that we renamed Mojo.”

Not everything went so smoothly, though. Going solo in a new town, with no prior farming experience, a small child and no family nearby was difficult. After building a chicken coop, an avian bird flu scare halted a planned shipment, so Rankin had to find the birds elsewhere. The winters were bitterly cold.

Then tragedy struck.

Rankin was getting ready to take Millie and Mojo to the national alpaca show in Louisville when predators—Rankin believes they were mountain lions—attacked the herd. Only Mojo survived. “It was so heartbreaking,” Rankin says. “That was one of our big learning curves right there.”

Determined to regroup, she used the insurance money to buy more alpacas and reconfigured the farm with the help of an acquaintance who’d lived in Colorado and knew how to safeguard the fields from mountain lions. Surrounding the alpacas and llamas with a “moat” of donkeys, and adding goats on the hill as decoys, Rankin rebuilt the herd.

Word spread of the farm’s comeback, and strangers stopped by unannounced to see the animals.

“We’re at the top of a mountain, at the end of a gravel road,” Rankin says. “So when you get here, you’re here. You’re not on your way someplace. You’ve made a wrong turn or something. We would spend 20, 40 minutes with anybody that pulled up the driveway, and we decided, ‘You know, maybe we should actually do a tour.’”

In 2006, she opened Apple Hill Farm to the public for Saturday tours. It now welcomes visitors year-round, with an on-site store that sells everything from gloves and socks to yarn and dryer balls, plus jams, jellies and honey from the on-site beehives.

Although Hurricane Helene damaged the farm road and many of the trees, none of the animals were harmed. Plans are underway to replant the uprooted apple orchard this spring.

For Rankin, Apple Hill Farm is “a place where animals talk and people listen.

“As a farmer, [I don’t have]an animal come up and say, ‘I’ve got a headache’ or ‘my foot hurts.’ So we have to listen to their behavior or their interaction or the way they move. We have to figure out what’s going on, so we’re very attuned and listening to them. It’s an interesting way of living, being very observant and watching for what’s going on.”

Rankin’s new memoir, “Farm Family,” is available at applehillfarmnc.com.

Lee Rankin: 3 Reasons to Visit a Farm with Animals

“Animals put us back in touch with what’s real.”

“It’s impossible to be in a bad mood around animals. They lift our spirits.”

“Being on a farm with animals relieves stress and grounds us.”

The story above first appeared in our March / April 2025 issue. For more like it subscribe today or log in with your active BRC+ Membership. Thank you for your support!