Our Rabbitry

This was the first step in our homestead (not including our garden). Yes…the rabbits were names from Frozen (two and a half year old daughter). Rocky was named after a goat that my daughter fell in love with while we were watching Living Traditions Homestead on Youtube.

I started the rabbitry about a month ago and had NO IDEA what I was doing. I watched countless hours of YouTube videos before I got started and I’m still figuring out a lot as I go along. I will tell you this…It’s a good start. If you’re even a little bit handy and have/ can acquire some basic tools, you will be off and running to start raising meat rabbits.

Here’s how I started:

First, I had to find rabbits. Holy crap was this a chore. It has honestly been the hardest part so far. I literally sent 35 emails within a 15 minute break at work to different rabbitrys from different sites, I called, I texted, and I Googled and FINALLY found one that had some rabbits available. I ended up getting two females and a male because she gave them to me for $20 apiece instead of $25. This step took me about a month. We live in Michigan, so I think this might have been due to the frigid winter we had. I keep reading that the males go sterile while it is too hot or too cold. This makes sense, because every time I got ahold of someone, they didn’t have any rabbits “at this time.” What a drag…anyway…

Second, I built two rabbit tractors. I put the two females in one and the male in the other. This saved me a lot of money in buying rabbit pellets from TSC because they fill up on as much grass as they can. I put the females together because apparently the females can get very territorial. Cool beans, everyone was happy….

Third, I bred the females. This was honestly a lot easier than I expected. Always take the female to the male. The male can successfully breed once a day. Easy peasy, my girls were both knocked up.

Fourth, I started the lean-to. I had 28 ish days to get a shelter up for my breeders. I picked a good spot in the shade (rabbits don’t do well in heat), and out of the wind (rabbits are fine in the winter as long as they are dry and out of the wind). I had plenty of old treated lumber lying around and miles of tin that I bought for a song. I built mine 16×6. 16′ because that’s how long the existing shed was, and 6′ because tin is 3′ wide, so there is no waste. I should be able to fit 10 breeders in here very comfortably. It will have a cement floor for easy cleaning, because I plan on using/ selling the rabbit manure. More on rabbit manure uses in a separate post.

Fifth, I built my hanging cages. I built two for my females so far at 3′ wide, 2′ deep, and 18″ high. I’m thinking that the cages for the males will be 2’x2’x16″ so that there is no waste on my cage wire. Also, the males don’t require nesting boxes and won’t have up to 12 other bunnies in the cage with them, so they don’t need all of that real estate. If you catch on to anything around here, it may be that everything I do has some sort of electrical components holding it together. I hung my cages with EMT straps and blue #10 THHN. There are infinite ways to hang these things, but mine was free because I have this stuff everywhere.

Sixth, and finally as of this moment, was the nesting boxes. I believe I made them 8″x24″ by 10″ high. I used a bunch of scrap pine that my brother used to trim his house. I literally pulled it out of my fire pit with one of those light bulb moments. I have to keep remembering that part of homesteading is letting nothing go to waste…anyway, sorry to satellite on you there, they are not of uniform size.

This was my order of operation. It was very time crunched because after my long wait to find rabbits I kind of gave up. Naturally, when I gave up I finally got an email, ran to get three rabbits, and subsequently had no place for them to live. For this reason, I believe it to be a good order to work in, as it provides all of your parts and pieces as you will be needing them. I will eventually post more to the separate parts of this to show you in more detail how why why I built things the way that I did, but hopefully this gives you a good jumping off point. I highly recommend Living Traditions Homestead if you are going to start raising meat rabbits. She has a great video series just for you!

All of my welded wire for tractor floors and hanging cages was ordered from Far North International. They are a great company to work with and I haven’t been disappointed in any of their products yet. On top of that, they were cheaper than TSC and they shipped all of my stuff crazy fast.

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