The other day I was asked which was better for home meat production, broilers or rabbits. That made me stop and think a bit. The answer depends on so many factors that it would be really hard to give a definitive one, but here’s what I came up with for the person asking. Rabbits. Why? Several reasons including where they live, what their goals were, and how much time they had to spend on the project.
Broilers are great. They grow fast and then go away. You can fill up your freezer with chicken in 2 or three months for a modest amount of money. But it is a lot of work, and you couldn’t do it in most cities or towns.
Rabbits, however, can be raised as “pets” almost anywhere. They are quite inexpensive, and produce a lot of meat. One good quality meat doe can easily produce 80 lbs of meat a year. Two does would produce enough to have rabbit once a week for a year. They will keep doing it for at least 5 years. You could feed them for free for most of the year on 1000 square feet of lawn (and not have to mow or fertilize.) That’s pretty inexpensive meat.
Here’s how a grazing rabbit system could work.
Two does could be housed in an 8 x 10 rabbit tractor. Does actually get along quite well if they have enough space. An 8 x 10 tractor grass 3 – 4 inches tall would be plenty of feed for 2 large (New Zealand White sized) rabbits for a day. One thousand square feet of grass would allow you to move the tractor 12 times before you came back to the beginning point. That should be plenty of time for the grass to re-grow to 3 or 4 inches. In my part of the country we could do that for 8 – 9 months of the year. The remaining time we would house the rabbits in conventional hutches and feed them hay and some prepared rabbit feed. You could also harvest and dry your own hay if you had extra lawn and save even more money. You would need a buck and he would need to be housed separately. He could either be in a hutch or in a smaller tractor. I would probably put him in a hutch with a vermi-composting system built underneath. The little bit you would spend on feeding him could easily be recouped in valuable vermi-compost either for your garden or for sale or trade to other gardeners.
Rabbits are easy to process. It takes less than 15 minutes from cage to freezer. There is no special equipment needed, and the amount of waste is very small. Since your meat production is spread out in small batches it doesn’t become a marathon of killing, plucking, and processing.
The skins are also quite useful if you take the extra step to tan them.
I have plans for a rabbit tractor and for a rabbit hutch with a built in vermi-composting system if anyone is interested in trying this kind of meat production. We plan on doing it this summer. I will be posting our results as the project gets underway.
Hm, fascinating. I wonder, could you do a little comparison? Like, explain why broilers are harder & why does it only take 15 mins to process a rabbit? If it’s not asking too much.
I’m truly curious!
I keep thinking about chickens (laying) or rabbits. But for right now, it’s very convenient for me to buy chicken/eggs from our local farmer and it really doesn’t cost that much.
I’d love to know more about this. I have considered chickens for eggs and possibly meat for when I have my own property but I never really thought about rabbits. In fact I’ve never even tried rabbit meat. I’m very curious to learn more.
Excellent information – thanks for sharing!
Interesting, nice & concise note!
I think this is a bit like apples to oranges, though. A lot of people do not like rabbit, and so it is not on a list of options to fill their freezer. That’s the first thing that comes to mind for me, not trying to be a nay-sayer.
we raise broilers. it is not a lot of work. perhaps we stumbled across the easy way, but it has always proved to be immensely do-able. every time we slaughter we know it is worthwhile and then some. this was true even before my husband built a Whizbang chicken plucker, back when I was hand-plucking with a baby on my back in a sling. Even 40 weeks pregnant I could move those tractors, slaughter birds, etc.
for us the choice is not based on city living (which I think is a really good point- urban ‘farming’ would be much more doable with rabbits) but on what fits into the culture of our farm. we have a Jersey cow, and she is a ruminant. We don’t want another grass-eater, however useful, that competes with our milk supply. the broilers are pastured but pasture is only 15-20% at best of their food. Pigs also fit well into our farm culture because they consume canning waste, garden debris, and soured milk.
Each ‘farmer’ has to examine their culture independently, and I think your argument for rabbits is valid for some.
My mom used to do rabbits. It was a lot of work, still. she did most of the work herself.
I do rabbits presently. I don’t regard them as a lot of work. I have not been tractoring them, because I raise rare-breed rabbits, and want to be able to sell as many of the offspring as possible as show and breeding rabbits. Tractoring is fine for rabbits you know you’re going to butcher, but if you plan to keep them, you *can* run into parasite problems. That said, between my laying hens and my rabbits (I had 8 breeding does this past summer) they have been paying for all of the chicken feed, all of the rabbit pellets, and kibble for three Retrievers – so I get my eggs and meat for free. My family loves rabbit meat, so that’s not a problem. I encourage anyone willing to put in 30 minutes a day to consider raising meat rabbits. They’re very easy, they’re good company (if you can bear to get to know them, knowing you’ll be butchering them in a couple of months) and their poo is the BEST fertilizer.
I’ve thought about chickens and rabbits and figured the egg production from chickens made them a better option for us, but if rabbits are better that may be a better option for us. How much meat do each type get, on average? That’s something I can’t figure out yet. We don’t eat much meat (I tend to stretch out the veggies and cut back on the meat portions), so we don’t need much.
Great information, Alan. I have often thought about rabbits. Our problems are an old dog who would go nuts about them and we still travel here and there too much to have rabbit or chickens. When you get your rabbits going, though, I would love to stop and see them!
Interesting stuff. I’m going to be trying both pastured rabbits and broilers this summer, and I think that rabbits can be superior, but there are kinks to work out.
I’ve been working with much higher estimates of the amount of land needed, even for systems that include supplemental feeding, due to concerns about coccidiosis. Many say that the pasture pen shouldnt return to the same spot for at least 6 months (or even a year), to allow manure to break down enough to not transmit the disease. Do you have a plan for managing this? or do you just not see it as a problem? Sometimes people are overintense about diseases. I was thinking that perhaps chickens could be used to sanitize the pasture after the rabbits.
would love the plans for the rabbit tractor…
would love to see the pics or plans you have for the rabbit tractor and setup for the winter with the worm bins thanks.