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We have a bunch of bunnies on the way guys! Kicking off the spring right! I have some new Daniel Salatin bucks that I added to my breeding program, and we should be getting 3 or 4 litters of bunnies very soon. When they arrive I’ll be posting pictures on the Facebook group to share with you guys. So be looking for that! If you wouldn’t mind, please go to iTunes and leave me a review of the show, and if you like it, give me a 5 star rating! It will really help to grow the show and encourage me to keep doing this for a long time. And if you know of any friends or family who you think would enjoy it, let them know or email them a copy of one of the episodes. It’s free and I want to get the word out there as much as I can! We can bring about some real change and positive results in our communities when we take responsibility for growing some of our own food.

Today I want to talk about raising rabbits for all the great benefits they provide us. Personally I raise them mostly for manure and dog food. It’s cheaper for me to raise rabbits for dog food than it is to buy actual dog food. Plus I get an amazing benefit of rabbit manure for my garden and potted plants. It’s essentially a fantastic fertilizer and soil amendment that I can obtain by feeding grass and weeds from my property. But I’m getting a little ahead of myself as usual. Let’s start with the basics.

Terminology

I always like to start out with some terminology when we are covering a topic that you might be unfamiliar with. Rabbits have specific words to describe males and females like most animals. Males are called Bucks, and females are called Does, the babies are called Kits, after they are weaned and before sexual maturity they are called bunnies. The birth time is called Kindling. The location where you keep your animals is often called a rabbitry.

Why raise rabbits?

• Rabbits are well suited for small spaces. Rabbits don’t need much space to be comfortable. You can keep our rabbits in all-wire cages with a floor area of 2 by 3 feet. All wire cages keep rabbits safe and clean. And really minimize your maintenance time.
• A small rabbitry is quiet and really shouldn’t stink. Rabbits don’t moo or crow or complain loudly when they want to be petted or fed like other typical farm animals.
• Rabbits are easy to care for. Each day the rabbits need to be fed and watered, five to 15 minutes tops depending on how many animals you have and the system you have set up.
• Domestic rabbit meat is lean, mild, and works in just about any recipe that calls for chicken. Rabbit meat is high in protein and low in fat.
• The ratio of meat to bone is high meaning there is more edible meat on the carcass than even a meat chicken.
• If you are worried about the noise that chickens would make, obtaining a protein yield from rabbits is much quieter and easier.
• The manure is fantastic for a garden and needs no composting to be utilized. Probably my favorite manure to use for almost anything.

What breed?

Choose a rabbit breed with rapid weight gains and adaptability to your climate. Some of the best and most commonly used for meat production are: New Zealand Whites and Californians. There’s a good reason they are the most commonly used, they do a fantastic job at making lots of meat very fast. But there are tons of other great rabbit breeds you can use as well. Here’s a list of good meat rabbit breeds:

Personally I don’t really care about pure breeds. I prefer the mongrels and mixed breeds. So I have some Florida Whites, Silver Fox, and Daniel Salatin rabbits in my breeding program. I love my Silver Foxes, and the Daniel Salatins are huge and very hardy. The Florida Whites are there to help breed in a little more heat tolerance for my future rabbit generations. But my solution to the question of what breed to raise is all of them! I’m mixing my breeds to get something that works great for me. But if you like the idea of purebred rabbits go right ahead. I like the mutts because the genetic diversity makes things more interesting and I think I have healthier rabbits as a result.

How many rabbits do I need and how do I get started?

• Start with a buck and two does.

• The does will each need TWO cages measuring 36 inches by 24 inches.  One cage will house the doe, and her litter up until 5 or 6 weeks of age. At this point the cage will be getting crowded, at which point move the doe to the other cage. The kits stay in the first cage until graduation day, or they might be moved into a rabbit tractor for finishing on grass. So if you’re using a rabbit tractor to grow out the bunnies, then you only need a single cage for each breeder.
• Butcher when the young rabbits reach 4.5 to 6 pounds. Graduation day normally falls between 9-12 weeks of age, depending on breed, quality of feed, and what you’re specifically looking for in size. But I harvest whenever it makes sense for me. Some rabbits go months before harvest, some are harvested at 7 weeks old.
• After a couple years you might want to replace your female breeders. Or even before that you may want to expand your breeding operation to include a couple more does. Keep a couple large and healthy young females out of your litters, and grow them out to about 7 or 8 months old. Now you can retire the older doe, and start breeding the new ones.
• Hopefully you won’t need to replace the buck for several years. I keep two bucks just in case something happens to one of the bucks, if I have a second, then I can continue breeding and I won’t have to wait months for a young buck to grow up to mature breeding age.

Housing Rabbits

I prefer to keep my rabbits in all-wire cages with the bottom and sides of the cages being ½”x1” mesh and the top being 2”x4” mesh and covered with a metal roof or suspended in a barn. It’s important to give the rabbits at a minimum of 12” vertical height inside the cage, but better to give them 18”. This is very important, make sure the floor of the cage is a minimum ½” by 1” mesh, and no smaller than ½” square mesh and that at least the bottom 2 or 3 inches surrounding the cage is covered or made up of the ½” by 1” mesh. This prevents the kits from falling through the floor or crawling through the mesh on the sides. It also makes sure the droppings can fall through the floor and won’t build up inside the cage. There’s nothing worse than expecting babies only to find them all on the ground cold and dead because your cage floor wasn’t sized right. That’s why when I made my own cages that I built the sides and floor from the smaller mesh rabbit wire and the top out of the cheaper stuff. It just wasn’t worth my time to cut out tons of 3” strips of the smaller wire to add to the sides.

Some breeders will incorporate a wire box in the floor of the cage as a built in nestbox. I am seriously considering this for my next cage or as a modification to my current cages.

Water is a big issue for most people, I really like the automatic watering options with brass nozzles that screw into special pvc tee fittings. The pvc pipe gets attached to the outside of the cage normally along the front, under the door. The brass nipple sticks into the cage and when the rabbits are thirsty they go to the nipple and chew on it depressing the pin and squirting some clean water into their mouth. I love this because they hardly ever fail, all you have to do is stick your finger in the cage and tap the pin to check for it operating correctly. I never have to worry about water bottles getting dirty, or empty. Additionally if I am ever out of town, whoever is taking care of the animals only has to check to be sure the feeders are full.

But if you can’t do the automatic pressurized watering system, then a rabbit water bottle is fine, so are dishes of water in the cage. You can go high tech or low tech, they all work but some systems work better than others.

The most important things for rabbits is to be sure they are protected from rain. Where I have my animals located, wind is not much of an issue, and the roof is covered with metal roofing material. However, I do want to build a shed for composting to suspend the cage inside so I have less weather concerns and I don’t have to worry about any animals disturbing them during the night.  Don’t worry too much about cold weather because they are fine in weather down to -20F. So in most of the country they are just fine in the winter. Some people have problems with larger breeds or more fur producing rabbits in the south or in high heat situations. I’ve bred for extreme heat resistance so mine don’t have any problems but keep that in mind. Keep them shaded and make sure they can cool off.

Feeding Rabbits

We keep their hopper feeders filled with rabbit pellets we buy from our local feed store. Additionally when things are growing, I crank up the push mower with the bagger attached to chop up weeds, grass, and clover. I dump the trimmings into a five gallon bucket and take it with me to the rabbit cage. I give each rabbit a large handful and any does with a young litter gets two handfuls. Weaned bunnies get half a handful each of the grass and clover trimmings. They all pick through it, chow down on what they like, scatter the rest and what doesn’t get eaten falls through to mix with the rabbit droppings on the ground. If we end up with some extra veggies from the garden that we don’t want we feed them to the rabbits. They love herbs and flowers, most root vegetables, tomatoes (only if they’re ripe and never the tomato leaves which are toxic) squash, pumpkins, cucumbers that got overripe and kind of bitter always go to the chickens and rabbits. Things that are great for rabbits that might help you cut down further on your feed bill are comfrey, mulberry leaves, shoots, and twigs, locust leaves and twigs but be careful of the thorns. All those things are high in protein and rabbits love them! You can feed them blackberry leaves, raspberry leaves, parsley, cilantro, spinach, radishes, carrots, tons of veggies and greens are safe for them to eat!

Some things to not feed your rabbits are, potatoes, onions and garlic, and any kind of brassica, that means broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, brussel sprouts.

But if you aren’t going all out on supplemental feeding, you can just stick with a good quality rabbit pellet that should have everything they need for their diets.

Breeding Rabbits

Rabbit breeding is very easy but there are some specifics you need to get right in order to have success. Always take the female to the male to be bred. Don’t take the male to the female’s territory. Females are very aggressive about their space and will castrate males sometimes. So if you have a single male rabbit then you want to make sure he has all the operational hardware to continue to get the job done so to speak. Rabbits ovulate based on breeding not a cycle. So what that means is that the act of breeding will trigger a release of eggs. Sometimes you need to put the female in with a male, let them do their thing, put her back in her cage and then do that process all over again a few hours later. If she wasn’t receptive the first time, she might have warmed up and will be more willing to breed the second time around.

Always always always mark down when you bred the doe and which buck you bred her to. You might think, “I’ll definitely remember in a month”. But you won’t, you’ll forget what buck was bred to what doe and you might even forget what day she is supposed to kindle

I make a note in my phone what day the doe was bred, and to what buck she was bred. Then I count forward on my calendar to her due date and I make sure she has a nest box about a week before her due date if she doesn’t already have a box in her cage already.

Does will kindle an average of 30 days after conception, but as early as 28 days and as late as 32. So make sure you mark it down on the calendar and be ready with a nest box. When she is nearing her due date, she will pull fur from her belly area and line her nest box with the fur. After she has her babies you will rarely see her in with the babies, don’t worry, they’ll be fine. It’s best to not touch the babies and just let her do her thing for the first week or so. Sometimes a doe will reject her kits if she smells your body scent on them. So I just let her do her thing and I normally give it a week before I pull out the box to see how many kits there are. After the babies open their eyes and start leaving the nest box, I try to make sure I handle them gently every day to socialize them and make them easier to handle later on, because you never know when you will find your next breeder you will want to keep.

There are three methods of breeding management:

• EXTENSIVE:  Most rabbit growers practice an Extensive Breeding Management rate.  This is where the breeder allows the doe to nurse her young for 5 to 6 weeks at which point the kits are weaned and then the doe is bred again. This comes out to meaning does being bred once every two and a half months. This rate should produce 4 to 5 litters every year. This is what I do for the most part.
• SEMI-INTENSIVE:  The does are bed around 10 to 20 days after kindling and the bunnies are weaned at 4 to 5 weeks. For 10 to 20 days the doe is newly pregnant while still nursing. Since these does never have a resting period they need a very well-balanced concentrate feed. This method allows for 7 to 8 litters per year.
• INTENSIVE:  The does are serviced 1 to 4 days after kindling. Bunnies are removed from the doe 26 to 28 days old. This produces 9 to 10 litters every year. This is difficult to achieve and in my opinion shouldn’t be attempted. If you need extra litters per year, I think you should just add another doe and make up your production that way. I am not a fan of intensive breeding management.

Products from Rabbits

We get some amazing products from the rabbits depending on what type of breed we are growing.

• Meat of course, high protein, lean white meat that takes on the flavor of the seasonings and vegetables in the dish
• Manure that is amazing for your garden or flower beds. This is a cold manure that needs no additional processing like composting to use it. Just scoop it up and put it where you need it.
• If you are raising a fur or hair rabbit like an Angora for hair or Silver Fox for fur, then you can also have the yield of fiber or fur! I don’t bother because I just don’t have the time, but that might be something to consider if you want to learn how to tan hides, you can make some really warm winter clothing with rabbit fur.

Crunching Numbers

I think rabbits can be a great way for anybody to raise some of their own meat right in their backyard or heck, even on a balcony of an apartment for that matter. Let’s crunch some numbers real quick.

If we have let’s say 1 buck and 2 does, and I go with Extensive Management for breeding my does. That means I should get a minimum of 4 litters of bunnies per year, per doe. That means 8 litters, and if each litter is an average of 8 bunnies, then we are looking at 64 rabbits to be harvested every year. if each bunny is harvested at 5 lbs apiece, then that’s 320 pounds of live weight, which comes out to 160 pounds of meat. That means you get 3 lbs of meat every week for a whole year.

So let’s step it up and assume a little bit better numbers and fewer losses because I rounded everything down in the previous estimate. 4 does, 5 litters per year, with 8 per litter comes out to be about 400 lbs of meat for the year, or 7.7 lbs of meat per week.

If you’re doing things right, you should have around $1.50 – $2.00 in feed per rabbit at harvest. If this is for dog food, then that means I’m feeding my dog at 40 cents per pound. But that’s using numbers that are based on strictly feeding pellets. If I am raising half the food my self, then my cost is cut in half. Now I’m feeding premium food to my dog at 20 cents a pound, or putting rabbit meat in my freezer at 40 cents per pound. That compares with factory farmed awful chicken when it’s on sale. I don’t know about you but that’s a huge win in my book!! I figured some of you might like to hear some of the numbers broken down before you decide on starting your rabbitry. Setting up, buying breeding stock, cages and everything will probably cost you around $500 for a breeding trio. Of course this assumes you’re doing most of the work yourself and scrounging some materials. Heck, you could probably set up your rabbitry for almost free if you are really resourceful.

I know I’m leaving some things out but we’ve already gone long today. If you liked this show, let me know and maybe we can touch on the subject later on, or dive a little deeper down the rabbit hole… 100% pun intended haha

I really enjoyed sharing all this with you guys, and I want to give a special thanks to all of you who’ve encouraged me and sent me messages thanking me for affecting your lives, it’s really humbling when I get an email saying that I’ve touched your life or helped one of your children. It really does mean a lot to me to know I’ve been a positive part of your life. And really truly thanks for being part of mine.

If you want to ask me a specific question, you can send an email to nick@homegrownliberty.com and you might get your question answered on the show.

Until next week…

I hope you have a wonderful day, God Bless. And as always “Go Do Good Things”