This is a question I get so often that I decided to dedicate a post to it. “What happens to their little legs when you move the rabbit tractors around?” Well…not what I assumed would happen.
I wish that my entire life was on video so that you could see the ridiculous events that unfold around me. Just last week I feel off of my A-frame ladder onto my extension ladder from my roof swatting at a wasp…all the while being yelled at by my wife from the kitchen window because of my lack of safety. Just a quick snapshot of my life for you.
Back to topic. So there I was, trying to answer this question. I thought “I’ll lift the tractor up higher so that I can see the rabbits better and keeps their legs above the ground. Don’t. Just…stop it.
Have you ever seen a mouse squeeze through a tiny spot while you stood there in amazement and stupification? Me too, but with a rabbit. So now I’m holding up a rabbit tractor with one hand above my head while crouching on the ground and trying to grab an escaped bunny with the other. Lucky for me, Kristi was outside. She ran over to catch it and the little bugger moused back IN to the tractor.
Oy.
So to answer your question, don’t worry about their little bunny legs. Just drag the dang thing slowly and they will be fine. Whatever you don’t, don’t pick it up high enough for an escape. You will regret it.
Side note: don’t swat at wasps while leaning over a poorly balanced ladder.
As always, start small, think big, and stay healthy!
Homesteading is for everyone! As a brand new homesteader, I would like to pass on how easy it is to get started. When you look on Youtube or other blogs, it is easy to get overwhelmed. Some of these people are running full time farms while you barely know how to keep a cactus alive on your countertop. Don’t fret. I started the same way. In this blog, I want to show you 6 ways to start off a small homestead. The cool thing is, that some of these things can be done from an apartment! Who knew!? All you have to remember is not to think too big. goals are great, but you also have to be realistic. If you go out and get 6 pigs, a cow, a goat, chickens, rabbits, and 400 linear feet of beans, you might fail. Start small and expand accordingly.
Aquaponics. Although I have not tried this yet, I plan on it this winter. If you don’t know what it is, start here. This is a great demo on a small scale aquaponics system. If I were you, I would steal his idea and run with it. I plan on building a small countertop version for my herbs. well, I should say, my wife’s herbs. Is there anything cooler than fresh herbs that are also helping to keep a fish alive? I don’t know, but probably not. This is one of those small scale sustainable practices that would be great if you had an apartment.
Chickens. I have not started my chicken farm yet, but it is next on the list for this year. I have never head chickens, but I know people with less know-how than my left foot that haven’t killed their egg chickens yet. This makes me hopeful that the endeavor will not be too out of reach. If you go to Far North International, you can find some pretty small, fairly cheap chicken coupes to get started. I have seen people in very suburban areas raise chickens for eggs with small coupes like these. If you are a little more handy and would like to do it on a larger scale like I’m planning on, there are many other ways to get started. This guy is one of my favorite homesteaders, and that link is a good start for a detachable chicken tractor/ coupe. I’m going to satellite for a second to tell you that he is one of my favorite homesteading YouTubers. Only watch if you don’t mind someone being way smarter than you. He has so many great ideas and explains them all very well in his videos. There are a few cool things about raising egg chickens. Eating fresh eggs (of course), selling extra eggs, you can feed chickens your table scraps, you can compost chicken manure, chickens eat ticks and other bugs, and they are just funny as the day is long to watch.
Rabbits. Obviously my favorite. This was the beginning of my homestead obsession. I don’t even remember what got me into it, but these guys have the lock down on information on getting started. It is not very in depth, but is a perfect overview on what obstacles you are up against and when they will happen. I would personally recommend that everyone start with meat rabbits on their homestead. They are so easy. All I do right now is go out every morning, fill up the water bottles, and put food in the feeders. That, of course is the bare minimum, but it’s all you HAVE to do. once your rabbitry is up and running it pretty much runs itself, other that any unforeseen hurdles. But if you are alive, hurdles will happen…so you might as well also have fresh healthy meat for your family. Obviously there will be more work involved the larger your rabbitry gets, or during harvest times.
Garden. I have always found this one easy, but I have always had a garden growing up. Don’t get me wrong, there have been a few years where I have produced nothing from my garden due to disease and weather. Lucky for you, you obviously read blogs and peruse the internet for information, so when it comes to disease and weather issues, you’ll be ahead of it.
Recycling. I live in Michigan, so this may be a little more state specific for the purposes that I am going after. I hate recycling at the road. I have one of the tiniest bins every created to hold an entire weeks worth of plastics, paper, cardboard, metal, etc. I have to PAY for the tiniest bin in the world. Why am I paying to recycle? I refuse. No pun intended. In Michigan, we have scrap yards galore. All of my metal is sorted, cleaned, and taken in. They pay ME for my garbage. Many places will take plastics for money as well. As for paper and cardboard, we compost a lot of it. Whatever we don’t compost, we burn. The only thing that gets thrown away is meat scraps, which can be fed to come animals if you have pigs or chickens. Bango jango, I will not ever pay anyone to recycle anything. Ever.
Composting. Composting is a great way to be sustainable at your homestead. It and recycling really go hand in hand, as it is just another form of recycling. We put all of our green garbage in our compost pile. There are a lot of different ways to compost. You can get worm bins, compost bins, or just put it all in a big pile like I do. I will eventually get into worm composting, but for now My way is working just fine.
I hope that these 6 tips helped you gather a few ideas on getting started toward sustainability. After all, that is the key to homesteading. The beauty is that most of this can be done with little or no property. It is a great feeling to know that your home is running clean, and it is my pleasure to help you in your journey to sustainability. Don’t forget to subscribe so that you don’t miss new blog posts!
I was mowing my lawn yesterday and had a bit of a light bulb moment. The rabbit I have in the pasture tractor hardly eats any pellets. I move him every day and he eats the grass down to nothing wherever he is….so why couldn’t I use the piles of cut grass in my yard? I took a handful out and the two rabbits I have in hanging cages went crazy for it.
Here at That Homestead, we’re always trying to find ways to spend less money. If i feed grass to my breeders, I will have about 7 months of free food per year. I free feed my rabbits, so that adds up fast depending on how many breeding rabbits you have at once.
Along with feeding fresh grass through the summer, I’ve been looking into drying the grass clippings like hay and feeding it through the winter. From what I can tell it has the same fiber that hay does. The nice thing about the pellets is that they still get all of the nutrients that they might lack from eating just dry grass.
Sorry about the video quality. YouTube channel coming soon. I will have a more involved post on building these in the future with full dimensions. Hope this is helpful!
I was worried about the poultry mesh because it’s so flimsy. It has been just over a month and it is still holding out. I don’t really believe that it will work out, but it’s pennies compared to the price of the welded wire, so I will probably stick with it.
So, this should be a relatively short post. I thought that, as it was my first step to starting my rabbitry, I should explain what I was looking for in my meat rabbits.
I did a lot of research and eventually landed on New Zealand white rabbits. Don’t ask me why the color is a thing…I don’t know. I honestly think it’s only a thing for show rabbits. Please comment if I am wrong, because I would love to know. I DO know that they come in all sorts of colors. Seems to be irrelevant, but all of the legitimate breeders seem to have whites, so that’s what I got.
As far as breeds go, I was all geeked and ready for some Flemish Giants until I did some reading. Yes they are huge. No, the turn around is not very fast. They put all of the first bit of time (and your food) into bone structure. This may be ok with you, but along with having home grown meat, I am also looking at it from a cost standpoint. Brass tax dictates that longer time from birth to table=more money. I know a lot of people breed New Zealand/ Californian crosses, but after much research on that, some people who are much smarter than I am were noticing that after only a few generations, the cross did not make any difference in the rabbit quality. That only means that they were having to re-cross their rabbits. Again, this may be fine with you if you have a lot more time than I do and are good at record keeping. At my homestead, I only have to keep track of one breed of rabbits. Obviously cross breeding throws more of a curve your way. If rabbits are your hobby, go for it. If rabbits are purely food, I say pick a breed and stick with it. I honestly did not do much more research than that on breeds because the majority of people eating their rabbits -that I found on the internet- were breeding New Zealands.
After you’re done brand shopping, you need to find a breeder. Gee whiz, I hope it’s easier for you than it was for me. Craigslist ended up being the winner for me. Once you find bunnies in your area, make sure you’re allowed to see where they live and that you get a pick of the rabbits. Anyone who won’t show you living conditions probably isn’t a trustworthy breeder. When you’re looking for breeders, make sure they are healthy. No eye or nasal discharge, no poop stuck to their fur, healthy front teeth (top overlapping the bottom, and straight). So when I got my rabbits all of this was good…but one of my females seems to have a bad case of vertigo. Terrible balance. Oddly enough, she just miscarried 6 kits. So other than the obvious, don’t take a rabbit if something seems off. It’s your money and you’re banking your breeding on it.
Short and sweet. I know that when you start looking for rabbits it may seem overwhelming. You’ll be fine. It’s really all common sense stuff out of the gate. There are sooooooo many people out there with blogs and YouTube channels, and opinions, but sometimes the majority rules. A lot of people are doing this stuff, so if it seems to be working for them, it may be a good start for you. You can always add/change/delete later. Start small, do your research, and I have faith that you will be a rockstar.
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.
