![]() ![]() Perhaps you want something with a little more color in your home hutch. A productive buck and doe can provide a family with 16 pounds of meat in just three months. At eight or nine weeks, they yield a four-pound carcass that is 55 percent meat. ![]() When full grown, both breeds tip the scales at nine to 12 pounds. It is also white, but it has black markings on the nose and feet. The Californian has some New Zealand in its ancestry. The New Zealand is the pink-eyed white rabbit that often appears in pet shops around Easter. Two rabbit breeds-the New Zealand White and Californian-are well known as excellent meat producers. With some experience, six annual litters is a possibility. Even a beginner should be able to produce four or five litters of six to eight bunnies in a year. Since it’s just as time-consuming and costly to house and feed a fine rabbit as an inferior one, don’t skimp on your breeding stock.Ī productive buck and doe can provide a family with 16 pounds of meat in just three months. While it isn’t as easy as common folklore might lead you to believe, starting out with good stock and sticking with sound management techniques will make things easier. One of the reasons people raise rabbits is their well-known propensity for reproduction. It contains 20.8 percent protein as compared to beef’s 16.3 average protein content. Rabbit meat is also more nutritious and lower in fat than beef, pork or even poultry. Add to that the ease with which rabbits can be cared for, the capital outlay involved, the small amount of space required, the ease of butchering the smaller animals (butchering them when needed reduces or eliminates a need for freezer space), and it’s easy to see why rabbits are so often considered basic homestead livestock.Īlthough a diet of grains and forages has generally been considered to yield the best rabbit production, the Rabbit Research Center at Oregon State University discovered that “with an appropriate nutrition level, alfalfa meal can probably replace grain in rabbit diets with no decrease in productivity.” It has been said that an acre of alfalfa fed to rabbits will return at least five times as much meat as that same amount of alfalfa fed to beef cattle. Raising Rabbits On The Homestead Don’t have room for beef?ĭon’t want to butcher a large animal like a pig? ![]()
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