Your thoughts for a meat herd?

ladysown said:

rabbits can eat corn plants with no problems, and I know of people who feed dry corn stalks to their rabbits.

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YES!!! I grew Painted Mountain Corn this summer, since @dlynn mentioned growing it. The rabbits absolutely LOVE the stalks both green and dried. It’s like candy to them. I didn’t get enough dried in time to feed it in their normal ration, but enough to treat them with it.

I’ll have to pull up some of the data I found about this corn’s starch and fiber content in the stalks vs other corns. The stalks are highly palatable and more easily digested than lots of other corn varieties as a food source for animals. I’m very excited about it’s use for rabbits.

MuddyFarms said:

YES!!! I grew Painted Mountain Corn this summer, since @dlynn mentioned growing it. The rabbits absolutely LOVE the stalks both green and dried. It’s like candy to them. I didn’t get enough dried in time to feed it in their normal ration, but enough to treat them with it.

I’ll have to pull up some of the data I found about this corn’s starch and fiber content in the stalks vs other corns. The stalks are highly palatable and more easily digested than lots of other corn varieties as a food source for animals. I’m very excited about it’s use for rabbits.

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Going by horses on corn starch it is the least digestible grain for them. Makes sense actually, corn was developed in the America's not Eurasia where most of our domesticated livestock comes from. Oats are best, but small quantities. Plant it self is not so much an issue, digestion is suited to plantfibre just fine. So yes feed the plant, use the corn for yourself or to sprout young plants as rabbit feed.

High protein would be willow leaves or stuff like peas, but then again starch, so better feed them the plants and empty pods, use the rest in your kitchen. Feed rabbits like the herbivores they are, healthy animals are always cheapest to keep.

tambayo said:

Going by horses on corn starch it is the least digestible grain for them. Makes sense actually, corn was developed in the America's not Eurasia where most of our domesticated livestock comes from. Oats are best, but small quantities. Plant it self is not so much an issue, digestion is suited to plantfibre just fine. So yes feed the plant, use the corn for yourself or to sprout young plants as rabbit feed.

High protein would be willow leaves or stuff like peas, but then again starch, so better feed them the plants and empty pods, use the rest in your kitchen. Feed rabbits like the herbivores they are, healthy animals are always cheapest to keep.

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Yes- the corn leaves, stalks, and husks are used as a fiber source in the rabbits’ diet. The corn is for my use.

My thought on corn plant wasn't about digestibility but one on storage. It is easy to cut hay and have it dry in the sun naturally in a day or so. But corn plants take longer to dry. If bunched together I would expect the to ferment as if silage. If dried entire, then I expect they will take a lot of space. I probably should have this discussion in a separate thread not to hijack the intent of the OP.

Zee-Man said:

My thought on corn plant wasn't about digestibility but one on storage. It is easy to cut hay and have it dry in the sun naturally in a day or so. But corn plants take longer to dry. If bunched together I would expect the to ferment as if silage. If dried entire, then I expect they will take a lot of space. I probably should have this discussion in a separate thread not to hijack the intent of the OP.

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Corn here for livestock feed is dried while the plant is still standing in the field. Drying is also a sign that the corn is mature and viable seed for next year.

Real hay that doesn't require wrapping to keep moisture wise takes more than a day, depending on the weather and time of year 5-10 days, tedding 1-2 times a day and sometimes putting it in rows for the night if days are already growing short and dew makes for wet mornings.

My rabbits enjoy munching on corn stalks under the snow in our garden, along with lots of other garden waste. This is our first winter with rabbits but I’d say they are hugely more adaptable than most modern rabbit owners give them credit for. I started out more worried and watching exactly what they eat. Now that I see they are fine, thriving actually, I let them sort through piles of garden and wild vegetation for what they want. They seem to eat or nibble at just about anything including things that are supposed to be bad for them.

If you read old books on livestock you see similar discussions as the one above. Today, everything is so cheap and readily available thanks to cheap petroleum that we can be very picky about feeding our animals - like only purchased hay and pellets for rabbits. Back in the good old days, people were a lot more open minded. They had to be to survive. Herbivores like cattle were fed all sorts of vegetables and grain by products (straw, turnips, etc) and chickens and pigs were fed all sorts of table scraps and meat from butchering day. Nowadays, everything is about animal ‘nutrition’. Of course the nutrition advice is often paid for by the feed companies, LOL, just like human nutrition research is funded by big food companies.

I suppose growth rates are slower on our diet, but the rabbits are healthy, happy, grow quickly, run around, provide amusement, and the difference of a few ounces or less of meat is fine with us. It is like feedlot versus pastured beef, or caged laying hens versus our home flock. We prefer pastured beef even though it has slower growth rates. We prefer our homegrown eggs to supermarket eggs.

If we want a few more ounces of rabbit meat on our buns, we can wait to butcher a few days later. All this extra vegetation is free anyway. And we have more rabbit than we can eat right now.

Animals also adapt to diet they are fed and when selection on thriving on feed company pellets is done for multiple generations and decades just switching to garden waste and so on will cost in growth but also health. It can be done, but you'll need to select for it and likely over a few generations.

tambayo said:

... , tedding 1-2 times a day...

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I tickles me to see "tedding" used. Sometimes I get eyes crossed at me when I use such words.

i love the word binkie

Alaska Satin said:

Yes, I'd say definitely leave them longer than 4 weeks! The only time I wean bunnies at 4 weeks is if something has gone wrong. They can survive at that age, but usually one would hope for better than just survival. I have found that 6-8 weeks works the best, both for their health and their growth rates. You can re-breed the doe at 4-6 weeks after kindling, wean the bunnies at 6-8 weeks, and she'll have 2 weeks to recover and gestate.
If you have a large litter, you might think about weaning the biggest bunnies first and leaving the smaller ones for another week of milk; that can even things out a bit.
Another option for weaning, which I like and use sometimes depending on how many does and growouts I have in play, is to move the mother and leave the bunnies where they are. That definitely minimizes the stress of weaning. Of course that means that you have the doe kindle in the grow-out pen, but I find it works very well when you have the capacity to do it. The doe can go back to a smaller pen while she waits for her next litter.

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Good to know!
I’ll definitely leave our next litter with mom for 8 wks. We’ve really been trying to optimize our growth rates. I figured that milk is probably the most caloric thing kits can have and therefore the most weight-packing. I just weighed our 9 wk olds and the biggest is 3 lb 4 oz. We plan on butchering at 12 wks. We plan on selective breeding to emphasize the fast growth genes. I’ve even considered introducing different breeds into the herd eg. chinchilla or steel gene NZ? Anyone have any thoughts on that?

I usually rebreed 2 wks post kindle, although if the previous litter is still with mom until 8 wks, is 16+ kits with mom going to be a problem? Is that many kits a stress?

Rabbit husbandry has been quite a journey… the first difficulty was getting them to mate but God has blessed us with 3 pregnant does! Now the hurtle is getting them to grow fast…

Hello. I take my babies out at 5 weeks or when I see she is sick of them and not feeding them anymore. I just butchered at 11 weeks and tomorrow going to try the canning process. Should have done it today but I'm tired.

Br. Fidelis Ebeyer said:

Good to know!
I’ll definitely leave our next litter with mom for 8 wks. We’ve really been trying to optimize our growth rates. I figured that milk is probably the most caloric thing kits can have and therefore the most weight-packing. I just weighed our 9 wk olds and the biggest is 3 lb 4 oz. We plan on butchering at 12 wks. We plan on selective breeding to emphasize the fast growth genes. I’ve even considered introducing different breeds into the herd eg. chinchilla or steel gene NZ? Anyone have any thoughts on that?

I usually rebreed 2 wks post kindle, although if the previous litter is still with mom until 8 wks, is 16+ kits with mom going to be a problem? Is that many kits a stress?

Rabbit husbandry has been quite a journey… the first difficulty was getting them to mate but God has blessed us with 3 pregnant does! Now the hurtle is getting them to grow fast…

Click to expand...

I usually give the doe about 2 weeks recovery time on her own before her next litter. Thus if I rebreed her at 4 weeks, I wean her current litter at 6 weeks; if I rebreed her at 6 weeks, I wean at 8 weeks, the latter of which is my usual practice for meat bunnies (I sometimes use the former for bunnies I intend to keep since I am not as concerned about early fast growth). The does stay in great shape with this schedule. Having two litters' worth of kits in with a doe at the same time seems a bit much; she'll probably wean the first litter anyway, so they'll just make potential problems if you leave them with her when she kindles the second. (This is assuming that she's in a cage; if you've got a colony set-up it would be a different situation.)

In my experience, the longer babies are with the mother, the better and more steady their growth rate, till about 8-10 weeks of age anyway. It seems that at weaning, especially younger than 8 weeks, they sometimes experience a temporary stall in their growth. They catch up eventually, but many of them plateau for a little while, compared to the bunnies left with the dams, which have pretty straight growth curves. If one wants to harvest between 8-10 weeks, that difference can make quite a difference in harvest weights.

We had a case in point this year with our meat pens. We sold four bunnies to a 4-Her at 6 weeks of age (the mandatory age of possession for our market pens), and our kids raised another 12 bunnies, left with their dams, for their own meat pens. They all came from the same three litters, and at 10 weeks (the age of market bunnies), the ones that had been weaned at 6 weeks all weighed between 4 and 4-1/4 pounds (average 4.16 pounds); while the ones left with their dams weighed between 4.75 - 5.5 pounds (average 5.25 pounds). Small sample, to be sure, but it reflects what I see routinely.

So it seems to me that you can maximize the amount of rabbit meat you get in one of two ways (immediately - I'm not talking about selective breeding over time). You can rebreed early and wean early while the kits are still pretty small, or you can wait a couple of extra weeks before rebreeding and wean later for larger bunnies. The first gets you more but smaller bunnies; the second gets you fewer but larger bunnies. (Although it wouldn't surprise me to find that within a few litters, the does you rebreed rapidly may begin to have smaller litters as well). Just because of the wear and tear on the doe, and because our rabbits have large litters, I go with the second approach. It's also less work and fewer cages, as I harvest at 8-10 weeks without ever having to move the meat bunnies into a grow-out cage, and it's fewer animals to process.

BuffBrahmaBantam said:

My rabbits enjoy munching on corn stalks under the snow in our garden, along with lots of other garden waste. This is our first winter with rabbits but I’d say they are hugely more adaptable than most modern rabbit owners give them credit for. I started out more worried and watching exactly what they eat. Now that I see they are fine, thriving actually, I let them sort through piles of garden and wild vegetation for what they want. They seem to eat or nibble at just about anything including things that are supposed to be bad for them.

If you read old books on livestock you see similar discussions as the one above. Today, everything is so cheap and readily available thanks to cheap petroleum that we can be very picky about feeding our animals - like only purchased hay and pellets for rabbits. Back in the good old days, people were a lot more open minded. They had to be to survive. Herbivores like cattle were fed all sorts of vegetables and grain by products (straw, turnips, etc) and chickens and pigs were fed all sorts of table scraps and meat from butchering day. Nowadays, everything is about animal ‘nutrition’. Of course the nutrition advice is often paid for by the feed companies, LOL, just like human nutrition research is funded by big food companies.

I suppose growth rates are slower on our diet, but the rabbits are healthy, happy, grow quickly, run around, provide amusement, and the difference of a few ounces or less of meat is fine with us. It is like feedlot versus pastured beef, or caged laying hens versus our home flock. We prefer pastured beef even though it has slower growth rates. We prefer our homegrown eggs to supermarket eggs.

If we want a few more ounces of rabbit meat on our buns, we can wait to butcher a few days later. All this extra vegetation is free anyway. And we have more rabbit than we can eat right now.

Click to expand...

I feed organic pellets but I also feed my buns just about anything green from my yard and garden. I literally stuff them with chaote vines, sweet potato vines, corn stalks, blackberry vines, comfrey, bok choi, clover, fescue, curly dock, and parsley, oregano and thyme from a raised bed I planted just for them. Kits start munching on the greens as soon as they pop out of the nest box. I've not had any problems with either the adults or the kits and they are all very healthy and it saves me money.