Soybean Pellets?

[Allen]

It seems the main issue with raising rabbits on what you can personally grow for them is the protein level will not sustain the best growth rate. That is a reasonable result and may be acceptable depending on your goals. I was thinking a home grown diet supplemented by a high protein source like soy bean meal (44% protein) might be a good alternative. From what I have read the rabbits will not eat meal but they will eat pellets. I have not been able to locate soy bean meal pellets for sale though. Has anyone heard of soy bean meal pellets for sale? I wonder if you could somehow make cakes of it yourself that the rabbits would eat?

Thanks,
Allen

 

[MaggieJ]

You need to use care if you feed soybeans. They must be roasted or steamed to be safe. These days they are almost certain to be genetically modified. There are limits to how much, by per cent, you can safely feed. I wouldn't choose them to bolster the protein level.

It sounds as though you are considering a natural diet for your rabbits, instead of a commercial rabbit pellet. You will need to do your research first--quite a lot of it. Pay particular attention to the posts of members who have done this successfully: michaels4gardens, Dood, Rainey, and GBov come immediately to mind and I know there are others too. (Apologies to those I missed. I'm pressed for time today.)

I relied heavily on alfalfa hay to keep the protein levels up, but these days it too may be GM. Consider field peas as a possibility--you'll have to do research . . . I hadn't got that far when I had to give the rabbits up because of mobility issues, but I remember considering them.

:good-luck:

 

[akane]

You can bake soybean meal into things or just stick it together. I've used horse supplement blocks with soybean meal mixed into them for the colonies. They make several types of things like that for livestock. The easy way to get such powders into larger livestock is to use molasses to bind it to a grain or pellet but too much molasses can cause digestive issues for rabbits and other small animals.

Soybeans do always have to be well cooked and they have a lot of potential downsides people are concerned about. Some refuse to feed soy at all. Other legumes can serve the same purpose. The problem is getting them in bulk quantities so I've only done it on a smaller scale. Alfalfa/clover mix hay was usually enough for mine but I generally included some type of pellet. Sometimes horse feed pellets or similar due to no good rabbit pellet around but concentrated commercial feed of some type that would already have powders like alfalfa or soy meal in them with balanced vitamin and mineral additions.

 

[michaels4gardens]

sunflower seeds ,have 16 to 20% protein , and loads of energy .. https://www.feedipedia.org/node/40

I also feed a lot of kale,


Nutrition Facts [for humans]
Serving Size 100 g
Amount Per Serving
Calories 49
Total Fat 0.9g
Saturated Fat 0.1g
Sodium 38mg
Total Carbohydrate 8.8g
Dietary Fiber 3.6g
Sugar 2.3g
Protein 4.3g
Vitamin A 200% • Vitamin C 200%
Calcium 15 % • Iron 8 %

 

[akane]

BOSS (black oil sunflower) is a good addition and I've used it but you end up getting a lot more fat and kcals than legume protein sources. Soybean meal per cup is around 2.9g fat and 55g protein. The numbers really vary for sunflowers but I have seen them come out far more equal for fat and protein at minimum than higher in protein and often skewed to near double fat over protein content. If you are counting the hulls the fat goes down but the digestibility of that portion is low making it more difficult to get accurate values. What is tested as making up a food is not always what every animal gets out of it in useful nutrition.

Having fed it several times I found rabbits didn't really want to eat it that much anyway and that BOSS works great for working animals such as horses but you can make fat rabbits if you rely on it for most of your protein and have them sitting around in individual cages. Not bad in small amounts, especially for colonies, but if you combine it with grains like oats that are already high in fat and/or you put them in cages without as much exercise you start to see all those downsides to reproduction and get fat deposits in the abdominal cavity before the numbers say the protein went up appreciably.

The high omega 6 and low omega 3 is also considered potentially very inflammatory and bad for health. I started balancing all BOSS with ground flaxseed or a combination plant oil supplement with flaxseed. I love boss but eventually I quit feeding much of it to anything due to how hard it was to balance as a main portion of any diet. I pretty much reserve it for fat addition and coat quality rather than anything else now.

 

[michaels4gardens]

JMHO, --
when feeding "what I can grow"....
I feed kale, collard [especially yellow cabbage collard] corn stalks [green and dried] Jerusalem artichoke, root, and stalks [green and dried.] Sunflower seed [whole in the shell] , and sunflower stalks [green and dried] Carrots [fresh with tops, and roots stored in sand] , and sugar beets. I also feed all household food scraps, [except avocado, and citrus] I feed the weeds removed from the garden , and vegetable plants removed from the garden [except potato, and tomato ] when feeding what I grow, I also provide/ buy sheep mineral supplement.
If you really want to feed "what you can grow" you should do quite a bit of research, - I would start by purchasing the Book,
"Keeping Poultry and Rabbits on Scraps" [ https://www.ebay.com/itm/Keeping-Poultr ... :rk:1f:0 ]
This book was authored by people who "actually" had extensive experience using the methods presented...
- First issued in 1941, when the national crisis [in England] made it essential for every scrap of kitchen waste and spare time to be used for increasing the nation's food resources, this book enabled the meagre official wartime rations to be supplemented in thousands of homes by a regular supply of eggs and meat, at a minimum of trouble and expense.
**Disclaimer.. feeding what you grow is not as easy as feeding pellets, and--it is very time consuming.. -- it is difficult, and takes a lot of experience, to get growth rates even close to what can be achieved with "commercially produced pelleted feed". Part of the problem is all of the water in "grown feed" . Rabbits will eat a much larger volume of feed to get the needed nutrition. Rabbits raised on fresh vegetable material will have much larger stomach areas. IE: "paunch".

 

[GBov]

I find a difference in the toughness of my rabbits' stomachs now as to when I fed pellets, much larger and tougher to handle the feed.

My rabbits get, right now at least, lacto fermented organic scratch grain with either organic alfalfa pellets or organic chick starter added in to boost the protein. Added to that bucket about twice a month is about a cup of oyster shell grit which dissolves over time.

They also get a big handful of mustard greens every day as that is the ONLY thing that grew well for me this last winter and they get coastal hay (sadly not organic as it doesnt seem to exist in an organic form) and a chunk of the red salt block. And right now I am cutting an 8-inch slice off a full banana tree that I cut down - it flowered and fruited in December and the fruit didn't make it - which some of them love and some of them don't.

If times EVER get better financially I will go back to ordering my organic feed online as that way I can get field peas again and won't have ANY soy in my feed at all. I personally hate soy in all its forms but at least when I ferment it, some of the downsides to it are evened out. I will also get organic pellets again, not because they are easy but because when we sell rabbits again they need to be able to eat commercial pellets as well as my own mixture. I figure if they get organic pellets one day out of five, it should keep them used to them enough to transition over to whatever the buyer feeds with less trauma for them.

And if we go away for a few weeks, rabbit sitters are so not going to want to be mucking about with buckets of fermenting feed! :lol:

I got that book M4G, it is GREAT!!! It did prove to me something that I knew all along though, to raise the food your rabbits eat you MUST have good soil and gardening conditions. Pure sand Florida is not the best place for it :roll: just look at the cattle in your area, if they are scrawny like where I am you will struggle and so will your rabbits. If they are so fat they look like overstuffed toys as they are in the UK or up in North Georgia, your rabbits will love you. At least, that is what I have found anyway.

Love that book though, it has made me far more comfortable in trusting myself with my buns, their food, and their housing.

 

[michaels4gardens]

It did prove to me something that I knew all along though, to raise the food your rabbits eat you MUST have good soil and gardening conditions. Pure sand Florida is not the best place for it :roll: just look at the cattle in your area, if they are scrawny like where I am you will struggle and so will your rabbits. If they are so fat they look like overstuffed toys as they are in the UK or up in North Georgia, your rabbits will love you. At least, that is what I have found anyway.

Love that book though, it has made me far more comfortable in trusting myself with my buns, their food, and their housing.

When I lived in Florida, I spent a great amount of my time and gas money, hauling horse manure [and wood shavings] from the horse farms there. In the first 4 years , I figured I had put 5 feet of manure on my garden spot.
but-- that made rich black topsoil... much better than the sugar-sand I started with...

 

[GBov]

It did prove to me something that I knew all along though, to raise the food your rabbits eat you MUST have good soil and gardening conditions. Pure sand Florida is not the best place for it :roll: just look at the cattle in your area, if they are scrawny like where I am you will struggle and so will your rabbits. If they are so fat they look like overstuffed toys as they are in the UK or up in North Georgia, your rabbits will love you. At least, that is what I have found anyway.

Love that book though, it has made me far more comfortable in trusting myself with my buns, their food, and their housing.

When I lived in Florida, I spent a great amount of my time and gas money, hauling horse manure [and wood shavings] from the horse farms there. In the first 4 years , I figured I had put 5 feet of manure on my garden spot.
but-- that made rich black topsoil... much better than the sugar-sand I started with...

I LOVE mushroom compost and hay as a gardening combo but it only works if one stays put and I seem to be a rolling stone making no soil. :lol:

In our next spot, we are going to stay put for five years but only pots allowed so it is a good thing I have so many 40 gallon pots. If I double row them out the full length of the camper and fill them with mushroom compost, that should give me enough room to grow quite a bit of what we eat and the buns can have any extra.

Something I have discovered in the woods is there is no wind at ground level. I never realized how much of a difference a simple wind makes. On the coast the tomatoes did just fine, here in the woods they shrivel and die of a zillion different things, never getting more than two feet high. I am looking forward to getting back to the coast where the wind blows, a huge chunk of my food budget is spent on tinned tomatoes.

 

[michaels4gardens]

Something I have discovered in the woods is there is no wind at ground level. I never realized how much of a difference a simple wind makes. On the coast the tomatoes did just fine, here in the woods they shrivel and die of a zillion different things, never getting more than two feet high. I am looking forward to getting back to the coast where the wind blows, a huge chunk of my food budget is spent on tinned tomatoes.

Tomatoes,
When I lived in Florida, I grew "Original Goliath", "Big Beef" "Miracle sweet" [no longer available as a true F-1 hybrid, what is sold nowadays is junk] "La Roma 3" [paste] "BHN 1021 [a great tasting tomato for the "South" ] ... and a couple of other varieties with broad spectrum disease resistance, and true tomato flavor -.. I would like to have grown my favorite "heirlooms" , however they were killed by disease before they produce fruit.

 

[GBov]

Something I have discovered in the woods is there is no wind at ground level. I never realized how much of a difference a simple wind makes. On the coast the tomatoes did just fine, here in the woods they shrivel and die of a zillion different things, never getting more than two feet high. I am looking forward to getting back to the coast where the wind blows, a huge chunk of my food budget is spent on tinned tomatoes.

Tomatoes,
When I lived in Florida, I grew "Original Goliath", "Big Beef" "Miracle sweet" [no longer available as a true F-1 hybrid, what is sold nowadays is junk] "La Roma 3" [paste] "BHN 1021 [a great tasting tomato for the "South" ] ... and a couple of other varieties with broad spectrum disease resistance, and true tomato flavor -.. I would like to have grown my favorite "heirlooms" , however they were killed by disease before they produce fruit.

I will try all of the above as soon as I have the pots set up, the first week of June. Late is better than never.

What you said about Miracle Sweet is just like I have found with Sweet 100s. I remember them as sugar bombs but not for the last 10 or so years, they are just nothings now.