We moved to a small house on 30 acres...

[jwcarlson]

Busy day today.
Burned a lot of the brush.
Kids caught some critters.
Built a picnic table.
Raked the mulch off the garlic which had four rabbit babies in a nest. Our dog ate three when he snuck off after he saw us reconstructing the nest.
Planted seven fruit trees. Five apples, a peach, and a sweet cherry.

[Second Hand Pat]

Oh man, talk about busy Jacob Great to see the kids out helping. The smiley face made me smile. Also it is really cool to see the kids outside doing stuff. Do I see frog legs at your dinner table at some point.
Pat

[jwcarlson]

Pat, I keep telling the family that we need to do frog legs. I don't think I want to kill them though! Knowing how long it takes a bullfrog to get to mating age up here. My understanding is it can take up to five years! Maybe that's wrong. I have had frog legs, but it has probably been 30 years. I remember liking them.
Regarding the smiley face. It's not that I don't like or trust you guys... it's the rest of the internet. Sure, I have posted pictures of my kids on the internet. But as they mature and, I guess, I increasingly think of them as their own entity... I realize that I really don't have their permission/consent to plaster them all over.
That's part of it. The bigger part is knowing that there's a scary population of mentally ill people who electronically kidnap kids, weave stories of their own about them, and "believe" they are their kid. A long shot, sure, but that feels like a simple opportunity away from a missing kid that we never see again.

Enough sad stuff... lol

Yes, we were all outside for about 14 hours yesterday. It was quite overcast and I got a bit sunburned. The little one passed out curled up on a bench in front of the window as soon as we came inside. The older two were nodding off as soon as we sat down. My wife napped in a hammock while I built her picnic table and ol' dad had a tiny bit of caffeine for about the first time in two years and I was up until 1. Whoops!

[danotaylor]

Nice looking soil Jacob. I would love to plant fruit trees on our acreage but the soil is heavy with clay making for very poor drainage. Thinking though a plan to remit that problem....we have loads of rabbit dung pellets from years of rabbit breeding

[Second Hand Pat]

Jacob, I totally agree about NOT showing kids on the internet be it here or elsewhere. I never did show my daughter's face and still don't and she is an adult now.
Pat

[jwcarlson]

Danny, it's all about organic matter. Rabbit poop is great stuff!
We're actually considering raising some meat rabbits. I would raise them on grass in a tractor (small cage) that I could move every day to fresh grass.

[LizStreithorst]

I raised rabbits for meat once upon a time. I did the slaughtering. I couldn't handle it emotionally for more than about 8 months. Same thing with chickens but I was worse. I did it once just to learn how. Once the animal is dead, the process didn't bother me. It was the killing part I couldn't handle. Even now, I can cull fish but I have to work myself up for the job and harden my heart.

[brewmaster15]

Danny, it's all about organic matter. Rabbit poop is great stuff!
We're actually considering raising some meat rabbits. I would raise them on grass in a tractor (small cage) that I could move every day to fresh grass.

Rabbits have one of the best feed to protein conversions. I would do them here but I would be the only one eating them. My wife and kids draw the line at rabbits. I did sneak some in a few times from hunting though.

A person in my neighborhood has emus they raise for meat and eggs... that really appeals to me!

I love frog legs. Have them yearly at a game dinner here... but theres not enough wild frogs to justify it here. I am seriously thinking of axolotls though.

[danotaylor]

I hear ya Liz. We have 1 buck and pair of does that we kept after winding the breeding program down. We aren’t actively breeding at the moment cause I got burnt out with all the slaughtering and processing. My wife and boys raised them and I processed them. I couldn’t get attached to them tending them everyday then killing them. At times I would feed and water them but is was minimal contact until “the day”. At our peak I was processing 12-16 every month or so. We still have 30+ vacuum sealed in the deep freeze.

Al there’s a few rabbit dishes we enjoy but after a while the appeal faded w my wife & boys as well. Boneless deep fried butter milk nugs was definitely the boys fav. Mine, was a bone in white wine braise dish. Which part of the axolotl would you eat?

Jacob we tractor ours during the warmer months and caged them overwinter. I hung our cage set up from the rafters in the back of our barn and collect the poop pellets from the ground underneath. They provide the basis for my compost, together with ask from our fire box, for my annual tomato garden. A local beef farmer cuts and bails our front 3.5 acre alfalfa, clover & orchard grass field. We keep about 12-16 bails to get us through the winter and supplement an organic rabbit pellet as well.

[jwcarlson]

Liz, I've killed a lot of chickens. And a decent number of deer (and other critters). I do not enjoy the killing. I've done a few batches of ~35 broiler chickens that we raised on pasture. It is tough, though. It's a lot of life to be ending. The hangup I have, however, is that if I'm going to eat meat SOMEONE is ending those lives for me and to the largest extent possible, I think that person should be me. I am not sure how my kids would handle the rabbits, honestly. The meat chickens are pretty easy because they're fairly ugly by the time butchering comes around. But rabbits are just cute and soft and fuzzy. I do not believe that I would have a problem getting over the hump, so to speak, but I'm not positive on the rest of the family.

Al, you're correct, they're among the best for feed conversion and if I can get about half that feed from grass it would be even better, but I've heard that it can get as high as 60-70%. Chickens being raised on pasture is not particularly effective. I'd be surprised if 25% of their food comes from the grass they're on.
The model, I think, would be some sort of a shed or hoophouse with deep woodchip litter and the breeding rabbits in cages up off the ground. Fairly dense hens underneath to mix/churn the rabbit waste into the chips and then make really good compost out of those chips. And then cleaning it all out and doing it again the following year. Joel Salatin has something like this he calls the Raken (rabbit/chicken). The rabbits are weaned at 6 weeks and then could go out on grass and be harvested after another 6 weeks.

It's all conceptual at the moment regarding rabbits. But the infrastructure is, well, a whole lot cheaper and easier than putting up fence for sheep!

[jwcarlson]

What are you feeding the hay to, Danny? Just rabbits? How many breeders did you have at peak?

Al, forgot to add that I think axolotls are basically just a giant frog leg, honestly. I bet they'd be good.

[danotaylor]

Yes Jacob, just the rabbits. I used some of the poorer quality hay as bedding & nest material in the chicken coup.
At our peak we had 2 bucks and 8 does. We would only let a buck breed the does 3 times in a separate pen then we’d put them back in their respective tractor or cage. 3 matings only takes about 5-10 minutes & resulted in 6-8 kits. Anymore than 3 matings and you can end up with more kits than teats on the doe and smaller birth weight as well. Inevitably the runts died, some eaten by their mom :/ With 6-8 kits, good feed & plenty of water our rabbits would range from 2.5-3.5#’s cleaned at 12 weeks. We found that chinchilla & NZ cross produced our biggest bunnies at slaughter. My largest slaughter day was 42. Not fun and that day was the beginning of the end of bigger production for me.

[brewmaster15]

Before they became endangered in the wilds of Mexico they were a staple for the natives. Basically the whole thing is edible. Theres actually some restaurants that offer them now..

https://soranews24.com/2013/04/23/these-guys-keep-all-their-cuteness-even-when-cooked-we-try-deep-fried-axolotl-in-osaka/

Its caused quite an outcry from people that keep these as pets and in Mexico as a cultural icon.

Personally I dont understand the uproar but see it no different as any other farmed critter.

[LizStreithorst]

Horses are no longer slaughtered for meat here in the States for the same reason. You know what happens to the poor things now? The poor things are shipped to Mexico and killed there. PETA has a lot to do with these things.

[jwcarlson]

Horses are no longer slaughtered for meat here in the States for the same reason. You know what happens to the poor things now? The poor things are shipped to Mexico and killed there. PETA has a lot to do with these things.

I was just talking about this with our kids this weekend. I frequently ask them "would you eat XYZ?". This weekend it was horse. They said they would try it. Then we talked about how they can't be slaughtered in our country anymore and they were curious as to why. I think there's plenty of animal abuse and modern agriculture doesn't treat livestock particularly well. But I also think there's way too many "save them all" type people out there who aren't willing or able to do any saving. Then, like you say, something even worse happens to them because of that. Hell, PETA kills like 75% or more of the animals they "help". How ethical is that?