300+ Pounds of Protein?? | Meat Rabbit Math 

Thank you so much! Doing our best to raise our girls right. I appreciate your comment more than you can realize.

Good info! Also we are looking at bringing in some goats so we will be sharing a lot of the same hay.

Thats awesome!! Thank you so much for watching. Enjoy those chickens and rabbits.

Fam, I would get rabbits asap. They are super easy to take care of. I have NZ & TAMUKS. Starting to breed them since they are around 6 months now. Feed per 50 pound bag was 15-17$. I also feed alfalfa too. I have other animals too. But rabbits are way easier than chickens and when processing too. 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾

They do provide quite a bit of fertilizer..... I have high hopes for my garden this year!

i shared my garden withh my little buddy for helping so much in that department! It's AWESOME fertilizer, and so is the kombucha/ scobys i made and shared wIth him

Thanks for subbing! Welcome to the process, lol.

Well it’s funny you say that…… going to be doing a video on just that in a few weeks with Spring here and bunny production almost in full swing. Thank you for your suggestion, I hope we cover what you’re looking for. Good luck with your own rabbit adventures!!

@@cedarporchhomestead Can't wait to check it out. 😃

Lol, sometimes I think I should work on certain levels of sensitivity, but I think you just said it best, it is what it is.

That is awesome! We just had 9 more born yesterday!

@cedarporchhomestead our last doe had 13, but we have lost about half. Something has happened, and we don't know what it is yet.

@@catalinaacreshomestead oh no thats terrible. We had a doe that lost her whole litter and next time around was a great mom.

We initially started with 3 does, but one decided to not cooperate with our buck and she had to go. Your outline sounds like it would work well and give the does plenty of time to recover after each liter. In your hot climate check out TAMUK rabbits. We have them in South Texas which is HOT during the summer and our guys did phenomenal. They were bred for hot climates. Thank you so much for commenting and we appreciate your advice!! Let us know if you get some TAMUKs. We love ours.

@@cedarporchhomestead thank you for the bred advice! I will check them out!

That's what I was going to say... look into the tamuks

Thanks! We raise TAMUK rabbits here in South Texas due to their heat tolerance. We just brought in a New Zealand Doe to see what we can get with her and our TAMUK buck.

@@cedarporchhomestead good luck to you sir. I hope it brings up your average weight on your grow outs

My grandpa used to say the same thing about wild rabbits! Also, yes Rabbit meat is very lean, and you can get what's called protein poisoning if you only eat rabbit because there is hardly any fat in the meat itself. We always use a fat to cook with when we eat rabbit unless we grill it, which is also delicious.

Awesome!!! Welcome aboard

Great question! We don't push our does at all. They get plenty of time to raise their babies for 5-6 weeks and then we give them some down time before rebreeding them. Usually we have anywhere from 15-18ish rabbits at any given time with the two liters at different grow out points.

Yes the $40 covers the breeders and typically 2 pens of grow outs. We move the grow outs twice a day in grass and that accounts for much of their feed needs.

That’s a good question. Our rabbits are processing out at about 3 lbs so their live weight is probably 6-7 pounds.

I'm still thinking we can get ours to the 4 lbs finished mark in 12-13 weeks, but that might be just hope talking. We breed TAMUK rabbits because we live in the south and it gets HOT! The TAMUK grow quickly and do extremely well in the heat.

That is very possible. Didn’t even think about that breed! Thanks!

@@cedarporchhomestead hard to tell thru camera but the ears and head indicates he's at least a netherland dwarf x breed👍 thanks for your videos

Depends on breed, climate/season, and probably forage quality (e.g. his grow outs are mostly eating his lawn, supplemented by commercial pellets and hay), doesn't it? It sounds like he lives in a hot climate (adapted grasses & forbs are often water stressed and invest more in antiherbivory strategies because the insect pressure is greater; rabbits were originally from Iberia [usually cooler; and with a tendency to retreat into burrows when hot--we usually don't allow that in domestic livestock for fear of predation and escape/invasiveness] and only a few breeds handle heat well [not necessarily the tops for productivity, which are usually NZ White and California], and he may even have problems with fire ants [though I have only observed them murdering the babies that get kicked away by bad mothers] or other noxious critters of warm places). Uniformitarianism is seldom a good assumption.

Rabbit feed!

You very well may be right. The fur doesn't quite look like a rex after I thought more about it. I'm hoping you are right, and we can add another healthy doe to our breeding program. Thanks for your input.

We are growing out TAMUK rabbits. We are getting closer to 3lbs per rabbit and processing at 12 weeks. We could get a larger rabbit if we waited, but have found 12 weeks for us is the sweet spot.

Great point, but wanted to draw a comparison to the closest “main stream” staple. Harvesting is always the hard part for us, but we know where our food comes from when we do it ourselves.

@@cedarporchhomestead My supper market sells rabbits. I am not sure of the cost tho.

​@@radamson1Usually "unusual" products sell at a premium, warranted or not, and rabbits are considered "exotic" in the modern USA kitchen. Also, economists have a concept of "substitutionary cost:" the economics of producing rabbit meat is essentially in competition with that of raising or buying all other types of meat, because meat, not rabbit or even "tastes like white meat chicken" is the fundamental product category aka dietary role/"need." In extremes (dire financial conditions or extreme urgencyto save/allocate money for something else), most Americans will fall back on the cheapest meat available, which is usually "generic" (not organic, pastured, Amish, caoon or anything else fancy) chicken thighs at least where I live. If I am evaluating how to feed my family, I will unfortunately have to look at zoning rules but also the costs and "trouble" (my labor/time) of raising some particular livestock and how that compares (cost, supply security, peace of mind from knowing how something was raised--not having had weird chemical exposures for instance like stuff imported from Red China often does) to basics like chicken thighs even if they aren't my personal favorite.

😂 exactly my thoughts. When I read the title and doing a quick mental calculation, I was expecting him to say he produced over 1/2 ton of meat with three breeder rabbits. Meat is not 100% protein.

May be less meat but the furs will be nice.

It’s called protein poisoning and it’s because there is little to no fat in rabbit meat. However when you cook rabbit in a healthy fat and make it a part of a diverse diet it makes for a delicious addition.

Almost no sedentary American is at risk of "rabbit starvation." It was a factor for Arctic Explorers and some early, underequiped pioneers, but modern people eat a lot of carbohydrates and/or fats. Normal people aren't eating only rabbits (non waterfowl birds have the same "problem"). We tend to use protein as protein (ie as an amino acid source), not as a major calorie source. Protein poisoning comes from liberating more ammines (including. NH3) than our liver and kidneys can handle, and we cleave off the amine when we burn protein into CO2 and water, not when our bodies simply chop them up to rearrange into other proteins.

Yes, if you eat rabbits ONLY. But who does that? And, in domesticated rabbits there's fat around some organs. Problem solved 🙂