Rabbits: The hub of the small-scale animal production wheel

As I hit the road at 4:30 a.m. this morning on my way to an 11-12 hour shift (plus an hour drive each way!), I couldn’t help but ponder what it might be like to be a subsistence farmer. The frantic-paced lives we live and the onerous expenses (insurance is my biggest expense) make me wish for a simpler life.

What animal would I build a small-scale food production system around? The domestic rabbit. It really is a true marvel.  My experience with meat rabbits began at an early age.  My family moved to a small acreage when I was 10 and I immediately began to acquire a host of farm animals.  I had bottle calves, goats, sheep, chickens, pigeons, pheasants, and New Zealand white rabbits.  We raised the rabbits for meat.  I still remember my Dad and I butchering them in our backyard on Ballantine Lane in Eagle, Idaho.  When rabbit was served for dinner we would tell my younger brothers that it was chicken we were eating.

Michele-April 1985-Provo, Utah

Michele and I lived in a small house at the BYU Poultry Unit (it no longer exists, nor does the Animal Science Department, what a shame) when we were first married.  I was working on my master’s degree and I managed the rabbit herd.  The title of my master’s thesis was, The effect of synthetic GnRH on the reproductive performance of artificially-inseminated rabbits (Huh? You can ask me for more details if you’re really interested).  Michele learned to eat quite a few different things during our first year of marriage, rabbit was one on them.  She never did drink the milk from the small herd of goats that I milked though.  She had also never eaten wild game. Her introduction to that fare was a rank old mule deer buck I shot a few months after we were married.  The best mule deer isn’t great eating, so you can imagine this critter.  We got through it by marinating and barbequing. 

Back to the topic at hand.  The female rabbit is a reproductive powerhouse.  She has the ability to produce 1000% of her body weight per year in weaned offspring. Think about that for a second.  Compare that to a cow that produces roughly 50% of her weight in offspring or even the sow that can only claim about 80%.  She and her kits do best on a commercial pelleted feed, but if not available or prohibitively expensive they can readily adapt to many different feed ingredients.  There is even some research that suggest they might be able to thrive in a pastured system much like pastured poultry is raised.  The initial investment in breeding stock is very low and rabbits don't require a lot of expensive equipment.  The meat is white, lean, and very tasty.  In a meats products class I was enrolled in I used rabbit meat to produce sausages, jerky, and even Canadian bacon. 

In future posts I will talk about specific breeds and more details on rabbit production.