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L

LASGSD

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It's a slow day at work today so I'm thinking rabbits. We have 3 acres of grass and dandelions. Instead of me having too pick the weeds for the buns I thought I could let them do the work themselves.

So I'm thinking of using one or two of the old cage rows as rabbit tractors. I would attach something on the top for shade and add a few water bottles to the row and then load up a few bunnies and drag it to a good starting place. After the weeds have been dealt with there I would drag it to a new location.

We use no chemicals on our grass so I'm not worried about that.

It just sounds too easy. Am I missing something?
 
If it seems too good to be true... it probably is.

A few possible problems:
1. The cage floor wire will flatten the weeds and grasses and the buns will have trouble eating them.
2. The rabbits may overheat. You would have to provide shade of some sort.
3. Dogs and other predators could break into the cages and kill the rabbits or simply frighten them to death.

Rabbit tractors are tricky. They have to be strong enough to foil predators, secure enough to keep the rabbits in and yet provide a flooring that will allow the greens to come through the wire. There are people who use them successfully, I guess, but to me it's a lot quicker and safer just to pick the greens. I don't know how many rabbits you have, but in the prime growing season it only takes me about 10 minutes to fill a 5 gallon pail. That is a good feeding for my few breeders and their youngsters.
 
I found that a cage turned upside down so that the 1"x2" wire is on bottom works reasonable well as long as the weeds are smaller, or the grass is kind of short and stubby.

It works best if you lift the cage completely free of the ground and kind of settle it back down in its new location with a good wiggle, to get as much of the grass sticky through as possible.

You will not end up with a perfectly cropped lawn, it is far from a perfect solution, but it's fairly easy (aside from needing at least two people to move it) and you already have all the equipment, so there's really no reason not to do it and see how you like it.

The caveats Maggie lists are worth paying attention to. For me, they weren't a problem, but in other areas I can see that it could be an issue.
 
I use exercise pens for puppies to let my rabbits mow the lawn, easy to move 5ft high, and they can be combined to make a huge pen. You can put wooden boxes inside it, and if you put (metal) screening around it it's pretty predator proof
 
I would only do it when I was around to watch them so I'm not too worried about the predators. The rabbits will HAVE to get used to dogs being around because we have 7 and on weekends during our club events we can can have over 50 dogs here. The previous rabbits had no problems learning to just ignore the dogs. :)

I was thinking about the x-pen setup since I have several.
 

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