For proportion, a rabbit will produce six pounds of meat for the equivalent food and water as a cow will produce one pound, making the rabbit much less expensive per pound of food and gallon of water.

Additionally, given the gestation time between conception and birth for rabbits is around a month and given they are so prolific, setting up a self-sustaining meat source is easy.

1. Things you need to know about rabbits.

Rabbits breed like rabbits. Seriously you need to know this. We have one buck. You always take the doe to the buck, he does his business and then you put the doe back in her cage/hutch. If she isn’t interested in the buck at that time. Give her a 20 minute rest. Take her back to him and all that needs to happen will happen. If he falls off her his business is done.
28-31 days later she will be giving birth to anything from three to eleven babies. The mother can make a nest a week early and sometime just the night before she has her babies.

You need to provide a bit of a box with an edge on it for nesting that is sheltered so the babies don’t roll or fall out until they are old enough to find their way back.

Sometimes you loose a few babies. It does pay to check them occasionally. When we had the big snow we found two babies had got separated from the others and had got a little cold. We bought them inside wrapped them up and put them on an oil heater to warm up. One survived the other was too far gone.

You can tell if the babies (kittens I think is the official term) are healthy by looking at their body shape. Their heads and tummies should all be about the same size to begin with.

We ween our rabbits at four weeks and by this time we have seen them eating and drinking water and know they are ready. By this time the mothers are also sometimes a bit over mothering them. Often on the day they are weened we mate them. You can mate the mothers an hour after they have given birth but we don’t do this. It seems a bit excessive. We think two years is about the right length of time to keep the breeding does and buck but we will experiment with this as we are not really sure how long they will keep producing.

As far as immunization goes, we haven’t. We decided to keep the rabbits in an area that is well contained and hopefully no wild ones will break into the area and cause us problems.

2. Housing rabbits.

The whole aim of growing meat rabbits is to make it happen as cheaply as possible. We have managed to build and buy hutches at relatively low prices. We have one hutch that was once a dog kennel. When we started out breeding rabbits a lot of our hutches were metal cages but we have found the quality and thickness of the metal that is readily available to buy today is quite hard on the rabbits hocks when it is used as flooring and so we have opted for wooden floors that we cover with sawdust.

The does all have slightly larger hutches as we try to give them a bit of room to spread out. When it comes time to having babies the rabbits need somewhere safe to have their babies. For one of our rabbits that means securing a wooden box into the corner of her hutch, our other two have little houses with wooden edge on the doorway. We clean out their houses or cages weekly or sooner if necessary.

3. Feeding rabbits etc.

We have always used pellets as the rabbits main source of food. Generally we allocate a cup of rabbit feed to each rabbit. Mothers often get two to four cups depending on whether they are pregnant, feeding their babies or teaching their babies to eat. Occasionally when we are low on pellets we have given them large feed of fresh grass hand picked but never lawn clippings! Lawn clippings are too rich and I think would cause bloat or stomach problems. Rabbits don’t do well on lettuce and brassica leaves – surprise, surprise. It can also cause them stomach problems so be careful with your household scraps.

We are experimenting with making home made silage from lawn clippings at the moment. We did a bit of online research to see how to go about this and our first bag is made and we will cure it for a four to six weeks and then see how it turned out. The thought that lawn clippings would cut down our pellet bill really excites me because we go through a good amount of pellets.

Apart from making your rabbit shelters (if you do not want to buy them pre-made,) taking the Missus to see the Mister and occasionally cleaning their shelters is about as labor intensive as raising rabbits get.

Since they are such a self-sustaining meat system, once you get your first litter, you literally can have access to an inexpensive meat source for years.

To learn more about raising rabbits for food, please visit All Self Sustained.