"It took them two weeks to eat the grass down. Meanwhile they cost me feed." "I had more poo than i could use. Meanwhile i want to improve my pasture." Ohh...kay.... 🤔
F L precisely. Rabbits evolved to subsist primarily on grasses and other ground cover vegetation. According to the material I’d researched rabbits are healthier when the bulk of their diet is grass rather than pellets and they’re lower maintenance if they’re allowed to eat what they’ve evolved to eat
You must have been feeding the rabbits wrong then. You don't feed them much pellets a day. You mainly feed them hay and some fresh veggies or grasses. 10% pellets 30% fresh veggies or grasses and 60% timothy hay. With that they are not that expensive. Not when they are the ones that produce the veggies (poo)
Yah, to each their own but the way this "pasture" looks i'd go the way other about it and get rid of the chickens. The rabbits leave the topsoil covered and leave healthy compost. The chickens ruin the topsoil and probably leave a spike in nitrogen
Is it possible, the rabbits ate too much bag food, thus they ate less natural clover, grass, lawn? Maybe they would have eaten more lawn if they had less bag food which would have solved two problems, lawn and money? I'm not a rabbit grower, so this is just a wild thought for anyone who knows to comment on.
Chickens skinny eating cheap "scratch grains" basically filler, and rabbit complete nutrition is cheaper than complete chicken feed. Chickens also burn with manure, scratch and peck at soil soon after placing there, where rabbit manure is instant "cold fertilizer" supposedly (though I've found rabbit urine to be bad if getting "treats").
my rabbits like fresh grass & salad type weeds. I compost my rabbit litter with worms and I never use a chemical on my small property. (27 yrs) I live in town with a large lot. To me rabbits are cheaper than chickens and much easier. I am getting two hens for eggs though. i had quit chickens for a time but I want my own egg supply. I probably have the richest soil around my side of town because it only gets worm castings as fertilizer. My property stays green year round while everyone elses turns yellow because mine is so fertile. I also am sprouting seeds to help feed my rabbits in the winter, which costs very little and I buy them cabbage, turnip greens, turnips and kale now and then. In the warm months they get the suckers with leaves off apple, mulberry and pear trees. Its basically free to feed them in warm months. Keeping them cool and remembering who gets to breed with who is the biggest issue for me. . If you like rabbit meat its the way to go. I am researching raising certain plants with high oil content for our use because rabbits have little fat.
Chicken manure is hot that's why you get bare soil quicker with a chicken tractor than you do with the rabbit tractor. You have to age chicken manure before you can use it as a fertilizer. Not so with rabbit manure.
Hi I agree the rabbits have needs but it looks like you have a great place to graze them in tractors. I read this so you may want to check but although chickens graze on grasses they cannot digest the cellulose. Whereas the rabbits can, also in some cases the chicken poo can be too hot for good grass comeback the rabbit poo on the other hand is fantastic.
Calculating feed costs by bags/unit of time is deceptive. What you should be calculating is feed/lb of product. Every site I've ever researched on said that rabbits are pretty much at the top of the pyramid in feed/meat production. In round figures it takes roughly 4 lbs of feed to produce 1 lb of meat. When I raised them myself, I found that to be true. The final meat product actually costs me less than $1.50/lb. And the livers are exquisite!
I agree with others here. You should have fed the rabbits less. They would have eaten more grass, and you would have saved money. I they had some weeds twigs and kichen(garden) waste, they would have been free.
In my experience, hay pellets labeled for rabbits tends to cost more than the same pellets labeled for horses. Why? Idk, but the Timothy pellets we've giving our pets for the past 5 years is $15 for a 50 lbs bag. Again, this was for pets. We've never raised meat rabbits.
You obviously don't have raccoons in your neighborhood otherwise you wouldn't be using chicken wire on your chicken tractor. Where I live we have to use hardware cloth. A raccoon will grab a hold of a chicken through the chicken wire and pull a wing or a leg out and start gnawing on it while it's still alive. The spaces between the wire in hardware cloth are too small for raccoons to reach through.
Nice chicken tractors man! Sorry to hear you no longer keep rabbits. I too hit a point where my rabbits cost more than they were worth. However, I decided to start breeding burmese and blood pythons - I'd always enjoyed my friend's retics at HS and felt the rabbits could serve as feeders for some decent-sized snakes. I now have 8 adult burms and 11 adult bloods, and my 10 females dropped 125 eggs in total last season. Given burm/blood hatchlings sell from anything between $200-$1000 (depending on the morph), the rabbits have been a big massive help in getting my females up to breeding weight. I also breed rats for the baby/sub-adult snakes (but they are super easy/cheap). You will have to attend reptile expos and join Morphmarket etc, but its been fun and has taken me in a different direction. All my snakes routinely take fresh euthanized rabbits btw (except for the odd fussy eater). I used to have ducks and hens, but I only have a couple of chickens now. The snakes are super low maintenance too, and may be an interesting angle for your farm if you are trying to up your returns. Good luck with the farm.
You need to get Easter rabbits so the eggs can help off set some of the costs...... Do you have solar power for the electric fences around the tractors? Have you considered a bug zapper in each tractor?
You know there is atleast one rabbitrace i know of that should NOT be feed with pellets, and should only eat hay, twigs, all kind of greens/vegetables, gras and dont forget to have a saltstone (and some grain if they should need it) - Gotlandsrabbit, a Swedish landrace. Sure it dont grow as fast as thouse meatrabbits but atleast they are next intill free to have under the summer and the extra cost of hay for winter is so low it almust dont count ...And the extra you give'em is veg-scraps from the kitchen.
How many rabbits did you have? When feeding a rabbit just pellets a meat buck gets 4ounces a day and a do get 4 ounces for the first two weeks of gestation the bump up to 6 then 2 weeks after kindle full feed because i pull nest boxes out at 2 weeks and the little ones start slowly eating pellets. Now if you was letting them graze there is no way you should have been going through a lot of feed unless you had a lot of then and in that case a lot of rabbits would have had your area cleaned up in a few days.
hi all am new to rabbits my self but have done a little researched on this topic for about a year. i think that a rabbit has a lot to offer. wail i was going about my research i came a cross this phrase called nose to tail butchering threw time it has losted its meaning what it means is that none of the animal goes to waste their are markets for these things i list but its about making market streams with your animal let me explain what am talking about by products of rabbits manure rabbits feet rabbit ears rabbit skull fur from rabbit face fur from tail fur from the body meat from the rabbit lungs hart liver kidneys (dog food) fish bait 9 different income streams from one small animal if you eat the meat you still have 8 income streams and you get paid to eat your rabbit they are ready to harvest in 8 weeks cant beat that same as quail and chicken 8 week rotation on these 3 3 butcher times in a month stay fairly busy and make some money not a great speller or at punctuation but I hope you get what I'm trying to say
You're right. There a alot of ways to make money on a farmstead if you use your head and creativity. It was a personal decision for me to get rid of rabbits. I could get more opportunities for money with some of the other things I'm doing. For you, rabbits may be really fun and setting up a market for your rabbits will be very easy. I just chose to focus on the things that I enjoyed more. Thank you for the comment and thanks for watching.
iwantosavemoney I rather have piles of rabbit poo because i can sell the meat , the pelts, the rabbit and make money all around on raising rabbits. He could have left a few for selling their young and the poo! But that is just me!
I used the plans for the chicken tractor that I used for the shed and greenhouse that I built. Here's the link and I hope it helps. Thank you. ruclips.net/user/edit?o=U&video_id=MQdeuM35okI
What an excellent video. It tackles a contentious issue. Ultimately, you should be doing what works for you and Wannabee has explained it according to his circumstances, very well. Also, given the age of this video [6 months ish] I look at the feedback was was a bit shocked the 'pro-bunny network' didn't line up... Me, I am pro-rabbit but to each his own/yard/set up/family/belief system and ideology... Thanks again RW... :)
This poor guy has no idea just how efficient rabbits are... Rabbit poop is cold manure so you can literally never have too much of it. Rabbit meat and pelts can make you more money than food cost easy. You gave them pellets when you had pasture.. Also 95% of rabbits diet is grass or hay which is cheap af if you need to buy a bale....
If your rabbits are costing you more than your chickens do, then you're not doing it right! Rabbits require about the same housing as chickens - except they need a slatted floor, so the tops of the grass can flip up - that's what they will eat. Rabbits in moveable pens on grass need only a very small amount of pellets, to provide the odd bit of nutrition they might not have available in the grass under the pen. MOVE CHICKENS AND RABBITS EVERY SINGLE DAY TO FRESH GRASS. Don't let them stay longer- they'll be eating the eggs of their parasites and ruining the roots of the vegetation under them!!
this could have been solved so easily! I think you should reconsider rabbits this year. Plant a small patch in your garden of perennial veggies/weeds for the rabbits, plant another patch of orchard/meadow/timothy grass to turn into hay, put them in a tractor on fresh grass and you will not have to use hay and barely any supplemental diet until winter (if it snows where u are). Have the chickens follow the rabbits in the second tractor so they can till the land and mix in the rabbit manure. Worms will flourish. Additionally you can sell one baby from each litter or sell manure to gardeners for an extra buck. Free rabbits + fertile land!! Monoculture can only go so far.
yeah i heard they have a lot of bunny poop every video i've seen looks like a mess with all the hay and poop i dont like hey all the videos they all said the cleanest not loud but only 1 video so far said the poop stuck really bad
Cmon folks! The food and purity laws in the Bible were temporary and were relaxed after Messiah came, became God's sacrificial lamb, and rose from the dead. See Acts chapter 10 and Collisions chapter 2 verse 16, 1st Timothy 4:4, Mark 7:18-19. If you are stuck on old covenant food laws you have completely missed what God is saying to humanity...
You only feed enough pellets to supplement nutrients. A rabbit can sustain on grass alone. If you cut all those bags and bags of pellets, they will eat the grass. You need to move your chickens before the ground is completely bare. You'll end up with weeds only on the whole place. Then you'll be feeding all them chickens too. Learn something before you make videos to teach others.
You could have sold rabbit poo! It is cold manure and everyone that gardens knows rabbit poo beats all other compost hands down!
Serious? You gave them pellets when they had all that grass to eat?
Exactly!!
"It took them two weeks to eat the grass down. Meanwhile they cost me feed."
"I had more poo than i could use. Meanwhile i want to improve my pasture."
Ohh...kay.... 🤔
F L precisely. Rabbits evolved to subsist primarily on grasses and other ground cover vegetation. According to the material I’d researched rabbits are healthier when the bulk of their diet is grass rather than pellets and they’re lower maintenance if they’re allowed to eat what they’ve evolved to eat
You must have been feeding the rabbits wrong then. You don't feed them much pellets a day. You mainly feed them hay and some fresh veggies or grasses. 10% pellets 30% fresh veggies or grasses and 60% timothy hay. With that they are not that expensive. Not when they are the ones that produce the veggies (poo)
The chickens just messed up that ground you need to move them more.
Yah, to each their own but the way this "pasture" looks i'd go the way other about it and get rid of the chickens. The rabbits leave the topsoil covered and leave healthy compost. The chickens ruin the topsoil and probably leave a spike in nitrogen
He gonna have nothing but weeds lol
Is it possible, the rabbits ate too much bag food, thus they ate less natural clover, grass, lawn? Maybe they would have eaten more lawn if they had less bag food which would have solved two problems, lawn and money? I'm not a rabbit grower, so this is just a wild thought for anyone who knows to comment on.
Yeah, I raise rabbits and the meat rabbits get almost no pellets. They eat the grass down to the ground everyday. Not sure what I was missing here.
Chickens skinny eating cheap "scratch grains" basically filler, and rabbit complete nutrition is cheaper than complete chicken feed. Chickens also burn with manure, scratch and peck at soil soon after placing there, where rabbit manure is instant "cold fertilizer" supposedly (though I've found rabbit urine to be bad if getting "treats").
my rabbits like fresh grass & salad type weeds. I compost my rabbit litter with worms and I never use a chemical on my small property. (27 yrs) I live in town with a large lot. To me rabbits are cheaper than chickens and much easier. I am getting two hens for eggs though. i had quit chickens for a time but I want my own egg supply.
I probably have the richest soil around my side of town because it only gets worm castings as fertilizer. My property stays green year round while everyone elses turns yellow because mine is so fertile. I also am sprouting seeds to help feed my rabbits in the winter, which costs very little and I buy them cabbage, turnip greens, turnips and kale now and then. In the warm months they get the suckers with leaves off apple, mulberry and pear trees. Its basically free to feed them in warm months.
Keeping them cool and remembering who gets to breed with who is the biggest issue for me. . If you like rabbit meat its the way to go. I am researching raising certain plants with high oil content for our use because rabbits have little fat.
Chicken manure is hot that's why you get bare soil quicker with a chicken tractor than you do with the rabbit tractor. You have to age chicken manure before you can use it as a fertilizer. Not so with rabbit manure.
I feed my rabbits and chickens nothing but the wild weeds and grass they find themselves.
And a bug zapper for the chickens.
And rain water.
Hi I agree the rabbits have needs but it looks like you have a great place to graze them in tractors. I read this so you may want to check but although chickens graze on grasses they cannot digest the cellulose. Whereas the rabbits can, also in some cases the chicken poo can be too hot for good grass comeback the rabbit poo on the other hand is fantastic.
Calculating feed costs by bags/unit of time is deceptive. What you should be calculating is feed/lb of product. Every site I've ever researched on said that rabbits are pretty much at the top of the pyramid in feed/meat production. In round figures it takes roughly 4 lbs of feed to produce 1 lb of meat. When I raised them myself, I found that to be true. The final meat product actually costs me less than $1.50/lb. And the livers are exquisite!
Why not put a light in the coop to attract insects the chickens could eat?
Great video and it makes a lot of since. The chickens are doing a great jobs on the yard by the way.
I agree with others here. You should have fed the rabbits less. They would have eaten more grass, and you would have saved money. I they had some weeds
twigs and kichen(garden) waste, they would have been free.
In my experience, hay pellets labeled for rabbits tends to cost more than the same pellets labeled for horses. Why? Idk, but the Timothy pellets we've giving our pets for the past 5 years is $15 for a 50 lbs bag. Again, this was for pets. We've never raised meat rabbits.
I am little jelous about your work and hoby
Very lovely viodo.
I feel happy to see all you did
Great
may your dreams come true
You obviously don't have raccoons in your neighborhood otherwise you wouldn't be using chicken wire on your chicken tractor. Where I live we have to use hardware cloth. A raccoon will grab a hold of a chicken through the chicken wire and pull a wing or a leg out and start gnawing on it while it's still alive. The spaces between the wire in hardware cloth are too small for raccoons to reach through.
Nice chicken tractors man! Sorry to hear you no longer keep rabbits. I too hit a point where my rabbits cost more than they were worth. However, I decided to start breeding burmese and blood pythons - I'd always enjoyed my friend's retics at HS and felt the rabbits could serve as feeders for some decent-sized snakes. I now have 8 adult burms and 11 adult bloods, and my 10 females dropped 125 eggs in total last season. Given burm/blood hatchlings sell from anything between $200-$1000 (depending on the morph), the rabbits have been a big massive help in getting my females up to breeding weight. I also breed rats for the baby/sub-adult snakes (but they are super easy/cheap). You will have to attend reptile expos and join Morphmarket etc, but its been fun and has taken me in a different direction. All my snakes routinely take fresh euthanized rabbits btw (except for the odd fussy eater). I used to have ducks and hens, but I only have a couple of chickens now. The snakes are super low maintenance too, and may be an interesting angle for your farm if you are trying to up your returns. Good luck with the farm.
You need to get Easter rabbits so the eggs can help off set some of the costs...... Do you have solar power for the electric fences around the tractors? Have you considered a bug zapper in each tractor?
Easter egg rabbits are the next thing I'm gonna get after the Jackalope.
Hey brotha, love you videos! Where are you locAted?
You know there is atleast one rabbitrace i know of that should NOT be feed with pellets, and should only eat hay, twigs, all kind of greens/vegetables, gras and dont forget to have a saltstone (and some grain if they should need it) - Gotlandsrabbit, a Swedish landrace. Sure it dont grow as fast as thouse meatrabbits but atleast they are next intill free to have under the summer and the extra cost of hay for winter is so low it almust dont count ...And the extra you give'em is veg-scraps from the kitchen.
How many rabbits did you have? When feeding a rabbit just pellets a meat buck gets 4ounces a day and a do get 4 ounces for the first two weeks of gestation the bump up to 6 then 2 weeks after kindle full feed because i pull nest boxes out at 2 weeks and the little ones start slowly eating pellets. Now if you was letting them graze there is no way you should have been going through a lot of feed unless you had a lot of then and in that case a lot of rabbits would have had your area cleaned up in a few days.
Chickens eating grass while rabbits don't? You have something seriously wrong there.
hi all am new to rabbits my self but have done a little researched on this topic for about a year. i think that a rabbit has a lot to offer. wail i was going about my research i came a cross this phrase called nose to tail butchering threw time it has losted its meaning what it means is that none of the animal goes to waste their are markets for these things i list but its about making market streams with your animal let me explain what am talking about by products of rabbits
manure
rabbits feet
rabbit ears
rabbit skull
fur from rabbit face
fur from tail
fur from the body
meat from the rabbit
lungs hart liver kidneys (dog food) fish bait
9 different income streams from one small animal if you eat the meat you still have 8 income streams and you get paid to eat your rabbit they are ready to harvest in 8 weeks cant beat that same as quail and chicken 8 week rotation on these 3 3 butcher times in a month stay fairly busy and make some money not a great speller or at punctuation but I hope you get what I'm trying to say
You're right. There a alot of ways to make money on a farmstead if you use your head and creativity. It was a personal decision for me to get rid of rabbits. I could get more opportunities for money with some of the other things I'm doing. For you, rabbits may be really fun and setting up a market for your rabbits will be very easy. I just chose to focus on the things that I enjoyed more. Thank you for the comment and thanks for watching.
iwantosavemoney I rather have piles of rabbit poo because i can sell the meat , the pelts, the rabbit and make money all around on raising rabbits. He could have left a few for selling their young and the poo! But that is just me!
Also how many rabbits did you have in the tractor to compare to 10 chickens
Hey I like your chicken coop on the grass ... do you have a video how to build that one?????
If yes please let me know
I used the plans for the chicken tractor that I used for the shed and greenhouse that I built. Here's the link and I hope it helps. Thank you.
ruclips.net/user/edit?o=U&video_id=MQdeuM35okI
Rabbit pellets are a marketable item
What an excellent video. It tackles a contentious issue. Ultimately, you should be doing what works for you and Wannabee has explained it according to his circumstances, very well. Also, given the age of this video [6 months ish] I look at the feedback was was a bit shocked the 'pro-bunny network' didn't line up... Me, I am pro-rabbit but to each his own/yard/set up/family/belief system and ideology... Thanks again RW... :)
Grow their food for free. Comfry, Alfalfa, Timothy hay. Probably have some around your property already.
great chicken tractor.....
ifn thing get tuff youll want some to start back up ?
This poor guy has no idea just how efficient rabbits are... Rabbit poop is cold manure so you can literally never have too much of it. Rabbit meat and pelts can make you more money than food cost easy. You gave them pellets when you had pasture.. Also 95% of rabbits diet is grass or hay which is cheap af if you need to buy a bale....
What’s those yellow plastic things??
Looks like an electric fence system.
Is it harder to sell rabbit products than chicken products?
How long have you been discriminating against rabbits?
So,no reasons?
Do you hate rabbits because they are different than you?
Your thinking about how to feed your critters needs some work. Just read what the ingredients are on that feed bag.
If your rabbits are costing you more than your chickens do, then you're not doing it right!
Rabbits require about the same housing as chickens - except they need a slatted floor, so the tops of the grass can flip up - that's what they will eat. Rabbits in moveable pens on grass need only a very small amount of pellets, to provide the odd bit of nutrition they might not have available in the grass under the pen.
MOVE CHICKENS AND RABBITS EVERY SINGLE DAY TO FRESH GRASS.
Don't let them stay longer- they'll be eating the eggs of their parasites and ruining the roots of the vegetation under them!!
Rabbit poo was going to help you with garden...of course lot of work
Flawed concept... Looks like everyone in the comments gets it except for the dude who made the video!
this could have been solved so easily! I think you should reconsider rabbits this year. Plant a small patch in your garden of perennial veggies/weeds for the rabbits, plant another patch of orchard/meadow/timothy grass to turn into hay, put them in a tractor on fresh grass and you will not have to use hay and barely any supplemental diet until winter (if it snows where u are). Have the chickens follow the rabbits in the second tractor so they can till the land and mix in the rabbit manure. Worms will flourish.
Additionally you can sell one baby from each litter or sell manure to gardeners for an extra buck.
Free rabbits + fertile land!! Monoculture can only go so far.
could of said that in 20 sec.
yeah i heard they have a lot of bunny poop every video i've seen looks like a mess with all the hay and poop i dont like hey all the videos they all said the cleanest not loud but only 1 video so far said the poop stuck really bad
?
Cmon folks! The food and purity laws in the Bible were temporary and were relaxed after Messiah came, became God's sacrificial lamb, and rose from the dead.
See Acts chapter 10 and Collisions chapter 2 verse 16, 1st Timothy 4:4,
Mark 7:18-19.
If you are stuck on old covenant food laws you have completely missed what God is saying to humanity...
You only feed enough pellets to supplement nutrients. A rabbit can sustain on grass alone. If you cut all those bags and bags of pellets, they will eat the grass. You need to move your chickens before the ground is completely bare. You'll end up with weeds only on the whole place. Then you'll be feeding all them chickens too. Learn something before you make videos to teach others.