Can rabbits eat and thrive on brown dead grass through winter?

Or would they be lacking nutrition and struggle? Are dead winter grasses what wild rabbits eat? Are brown grasses inferior to green growing grasses?

I ask because I would like to put some weened kits eventually into a rabbit tractor on the ground through the winter. I wonder if I should plan on feeding pellets and store-bought green hay until spring.

you'll need to feed some pellets, and give them some hay. Can you find horse-quality baled hay (small squares)? That would be cheaper than store bought hay most likely.

Wild, and if given the chance also domestic rabbits find some greenish stuff under the snow, close to the ground, and under the dead stuff. Although they do sometimes eat it, the brown, dead grasses alone lack nutrients. Starch, sugars and protein have been removed into the roots or detoriated - it is not the same as hay. Hay is nothing natural, it is conserved food. If it gets damp it will detoriate too.

They also eat saplings, tree bark, leaves and roots. Mine are now tilling over the Topinambut plot and I cut tree branches for them.

You can definitly let them out now, they'll enjoy nibbling what they can find, but you still have to feed them since what little there is to find will be gone in no time and doesn't grow back until spring.

Agreed--brown dead vegetation may have some fiber value, but not nutrition. For sheep, farmers sometimes 'stockpile' grass, choosing varieties that stay green and palatable through the winter (not Zoysia type that goes brown until next spring, or Holcus velvet grass that livestock won't eat unless the growth is young and fresh). They stop cutting/pasturing the field at least 6-8 weeks before first frost, allowing time for the grass to grow before cold temps stop all growth. When the normal pasturage is finished for the year, they are allowed to eat the stockpiled grass. The wild bison of the American plains did this, by grazing an area down and then moving on to fresh pastures during the winter.

Branches are a significant food source for wild rabbits in the winter, as well as winter annual 'weeds' such as chickweed and purple dead nettle that don't sprout until a few weeks before first frost, so they're young and tasty in the winter. Since a rabbit's preferred way of eating is to take a bite here and a bite there, instead of clearing an area out, they balance their nutrients.

To put the rabbits on a normal winter lawn--yes, you need to feed pellets, or whatever your normal rabbit food is.

@judymac Interesting about branches. Can one place a variety of branches for the rabbits and trust they will eat what's beneficial and avoid what is harmful? I read about it being okay to give apple tree branches, but not apricot tree branches. I wouldn't want to inadvertently give something harmful and they eat it.

They are somewhat picky what branches they eat, and do avoid harmful stuff or amounts, at least when they have some practice picking their food. Also some stuff is tastier than other, like, mine like fir but ignore spruce., their favorites apart from all fruit trees (including plums etc) are willow, ash, hornbeam, forsythia, hasel.

I stopped reading thosw "toxic" lists, there is very little that I would activly remove to not have them try it, like yew or oleander. Otherwise, since mine are free roam during daytime they can pick whatever they want, they grew up that way and know what and how much they can stomach, and they definitly do not care about those lists and snack through quite a lot of it with no adverse effects.

ladysown said:

you'll need to feed some pellets, and give them some hay. Can you find horse-quality baled hay (small squares)? That would be cheaper than store bought hay most likely.

Click to expand...

This may be a stupid question but, isn't hay just dead grass that's been baled.

Skai said:

This may be a stupid question but, isn't hay just dead grass that's been baled.

Click to expand...

Hay is grass cut at max nutrition point (or a little less depending on what is should feed) in summer to preserve it for winter feed. It is very similar to drying veg/fruit that people do for winter storage of summer food.

Skai said:

This may be a stupid question but, isn't hay just dead grass that's been baled.

Click to expand...

No, not a stupid question at all. Hay is indeed dried vegetation that has been baled for convenience of storage, but it can be a complicated issue. Hay can be made of many different plants--unimproved meadow hay may have a wide variety of "weeds", such as yarrow, goldenrod, or various daisy family members; legumes such as clover, and various types of grass. Legumes such as clover and alfalfa provide high protein, but alfalfa is prone to woody stems and small leaves that shatter and fall easily. Even plain old grass has different nutritional value based on the stage of growth and even the time of day.

After cutting, if the conditions are good, farmers often get several more crops of hay from the same field. The first cutting is often stemmy and brownish, as it is often too wet and cool in the spring to cut and dry hay properly. Those who wait until the 4th of July to bale hay due to wet/cool conditions often only get the one crop of hay for the year, and it is often of poor quality as the grass has already gone to seed, as low as only 5% protein, and not much vitamin content as the grasses are already bleached out.

Second and third cut hays are usually much greener, shorter, and leafier, about 6-8 weeks of fresh, new growth. Cut early in the morning, as soon as the dew dries, it will have maximum sugars in the leaves, making it extra palatable to the livestock. Dried quickly and thoroughly, baled dry and stored dry out of the sunlight will make the best possible hay product.

There's actually a lot that goes into making good hay. Hay that is baled damp can develop a deadly mold. If you see clouds of white 'dust' coming from your bale when you open it, be very concerned. If the hay has a musty smell, be very concerned. Good hay is a delight to rabbits. They'll often eat poor quality hay and straw just for the joy of chewing it (you can tell when the straw filled nestbox is empty the next morning. Straw, by the way, is the dried stem of the mature grain plant after the grain has been removed--could be oat straw, rye straw (good for making straw hats), rice straw, etc.)

So, there's a lot that goes into good nutritional hay. We feed mulberry leaf hay as a treat, made from dried mulberry leaves, with a protein level around 15%..

Skai said:

This may be a stupid question but, isn't hay just dead grass that's been baled.

Click to expand...

Not a stupid question, but no. Not exactly.

So, in the fall when the grass starts dying out for the year, a lot of the nutrition sinks back into the roots to be stored until spring, so fall killed grass doesn't have much other than fiber left in it. Hay is harvested when the plant is still actively growing and all of the nutrition is still in the leaves.

Hay is a dried version of summer grass not a dried version of fall or winter grass.