Chickens or Rabbits?

[Jennifer L.]

Which do you think are more cost effective for meat? Setting aside eggs, (since you don't need too many chickens for eggs for the average family, a small flock of four or six hens can be fed relatively cheaply even if you buy grain for them) and just looking at chickens as a meat animal, where do they stack up next to meat rabbits?

I ask because here in the North, unless you grow your own grain you are tied to a feed store in the winter. A rabbit can eat hay, and may be a better value in the North because of this (most people can grow hay). It's fine that a chicken can free range in the summer, but where it's cold that's a good portion of the year you are feeding grain.

So I started to wonder today what others might think about this. Any opinions?

Jennifer

[Cannon_Farms]

do you have the market to sell rabbits? Though most homesteaders dont have a problem with it, unles you have an ethnic population to sell too, Id stick with the chickens, I have a better turn over raising meat birds and a faster one to boot

[DW]

I can kill a chicken but rabbits remind me too much of cats...can't kill. I can kill a wild rabbit b/c one bad winter they ate our elms!

[GoldenMom]

Chickens are faster/easier (if you buy chicks rather than set eggs from your own hens). If you go with Cornish crosses you can have them butchered and gone in 8 weeks ("regular" chickens take a lot longer to reach any sort of butchering size). There's no reason to need to keep meat chickens over winter. With rabbits you need to keep the breeding stock year-round. They will probably need more than just hay in the winter.

[Freeholder]

If you are looking for a meat supply only for your own family (not to sell), and if you are thinking about still being able to feed your family even if there isn't any feed to buy in the feed stores, then I would go with rabbits. If you don't push them too hard, they can do fine on weeds and hay and brush from your yard, with no bought feed (except maybe a mineral spool). That makes their cost only your time (and it would take more time than if you just buy their feed).

Kathleen

[Pelenaka]

I 2nd what Kathleen wrote.
Also buns are quiet. Noise might be a big deal in a SHTF reality.
Or in my case really close neighbors.

http://thirtyfivebyninety.blogspot.c...ck-rabbit.html

[Kmac15]

Just a bit of thread drift here....
I feed vegetable scraps to my chickens all the time but I understand that to many scraps are bad for bunnies?

In a pinch I could feed a couple of hens from scrapes and weeds, not sure how bunnies do free ranging LOL

[MaggieJ]

Hey, Jennifer. Since you are not so far from me as the crow flies, our vegetation/climate are about the same. So I'll just put in my two cents (Canadian).

Why either/or? For the best of both worlds, keep a small herd of rabbits and a small flock of laying hens and one rooster.

The rabbits will give you year around meat (if you address concerns about newborn kits freezing) and the hens year around eggs plus some meat. What could be better?

Raise the rabbits on a hay-based diet. Supplement with weeds and garden surplus from spring to snowfall and with root crops, pumpkin, sprouted grain, safe twigs, branches and dried leaves and so forth through the winter. They will still need a bit of grain, but not much.

Let your hens go broody and raise their chicks. Free range the chickens to minimize costs and to give them a lovely life. Yes, they will need grain, but not much in summer and if you cull hard in fall, keeping only the best 4-6 hens and your rooster over the winter, they won't cost much to feed even in winter. All the cockerels, inferior or surplus pullets and unproductive or nasty hens go to the freezer along about October.

Young hens, coming into lay in late fall, will usually lay right through the winter. They may stop briefly in late December when the cold really clamps down and the days are short, but will soon begin again. My two Dominique hens are nearly three years old and are still laying an egg each at least five days a week. They are an excellent heritage bird that ranges efficiently. I also have four sex link pullets that are laying well, although they got off to a late start since they were only hatched last July. My birds get a scoop of scratch and any suitable leftovers/scraps each day and are doing well on that.

Whenever you have surplus eggs, they can be frozen to feed back to the hens as a protein supplement when they need it most. (Of course if you can sell some, so much the better... you can use the money to buy the grain for both the chickens and rabbits.) You can also feed them all meat scraps including the less choice bits of rabbit when you butcher - trimmings, any giblets that you won't use yourself, lungs etc. My little flock had three days worth of meat supplement from our last rabbit butchering and that was from only two roasters.

Another way to cut costs for the chickens is to raise worms. This works well with rabbits, as the litter can be used in worm bins. If you start with clean stock from a good worm farm, there should be no parasite concerns.

If you have a joint rabbit/chicken house (with the rabbit cages covered to keep them from getting pooped on) the chickens will get a lot of their feed from under the rabbit cages and will also keep the litter aerated with their scratching. And, of course, there is nothing better for your garden than worm castings and rabbit manure.

In fact, the rabbits/worms/chickens/garden cycle is one of the best homesteading activities going. The parts work together so much better than any one part alone.

We use about a bag of scratch grain a month in winter for three geese, six chickens and 10 - 12 rabbits. It now costs about $15 a bag, a big increase. (It would last longer than that if my son were not the one who usually does the feeding... he tends to overfeed, especially the rabbits.) We don't make our own hay, but it costs only $3 a bale from the farmer down the road and we use about 15 - 18 bales a year. Again, there is some waste as the grass hay gets used sometimes as litter for the geese and chickens. Straw is only slightly cheaper and we always seem to run out of it. Say a maximum of $60 for hay and perhaps $100 for scratch for the year. That doesn't seem to me to be so bad when you figure we never need to buy fertilizer or eggs and have a good supply of rabbit meat. Our chicken breeding has kind of broken down, since the demise of our good Speckled Sussex rooster a couple of years ago, but I like having the hens around. They are excellent for bug control as well as eggs. One of these years, I'll try to find a decent rooster again, but the last two (Dominiques) were mean and I haven't bothered to replace them.

[Jennifer L.]

Thanks for the replys. I thought it would be interesting to see how others viewed the two. I do have both rabbits and utility chickens, but haven't grown any of the cornish cross birds for quite a few years because they take so much grain, yet a lot of people here on the forums do grow them despite that fact and I've wondered at it.

To me there does seem that there is an advantage for meat rabbit over chickens because of the cost of grain, at least here in the North.

I have sold meat rabbits, but the price paid around here is $1.30 a pound liveweight with a 130 mile round trip to get to the bunny runner, so it hasn't been cost effective to sell since the price of rabbit pellets went up. I can feed good hay and get slower growth, but for the amount of rabbits I'd have to have to keep it commercial it didn't make financial sense, so I've now cut back from 80 does to just a handful of rabbits for personal use.

One thing about rabbits, they do produce year round. Keeping a breeder over the winter doesn't mean you aren't making fryers during the cold months. And at the same time, you have to buy cornish cross chicks whereas the meat varieties of rabbits can be sustained by anyone without new input every time you need new fryers.

Maggie, that's a good idea about the worms. I hadn't considered growing worms for chickens before. You've certainly showed what rabbits can do for the homestead with your posts on feeding!

Jennifer

[MaggieJ]

Here's a good link:

http://www.lionsgrip.com/worms.html

[Terri]

*IF* you have toddlers, then you have a lot of food wasted. Chickens can eat that for a good part of their food, if you have only 4-6 hens.

If you buy the food, I think rabbits would be cheaper because of the hay that they can eat. They WILL still need grain: rabbits in the wild do not weight 5 pounds at 6 weeks. Modern rabbits need rich food! But, SOME of their feed can come from vegetation!

[Freeholder]

Terri, actually modern rabbits DON'T need rich food! They will grow a little more slowly on home-grown feeds, but they will still grow and produce. You might have to keep a couple more does to get the same number of kits per year, but if the feed is free, it won't take much more time to cut the hay for those extra does.

Kmac, if you try to keep your chickens on nothing but vegetable scraps, you'll soon find yourself short on eggs. Chickens need protein and fat in their diet (they are NOT vegetarians, in spite of the so-called 'vegetarian' eggs that are sold at the stores). There are a lot of things you can do to supplement their protein intake -- if they are free-range in the summer, they may be able to pick up enough on their own. But in winter, you'll have to give them a hand. Maggie mentioned some of the things you can feed chickens to supplement their protein -- you can also feed them the offal from butchering chickens (or cleaning fish, or anything else you butcher).

Kathleen

[DavidUnderwood]

A couple of side notes:
I trap 3 months a year. The fat scraped
from coons and beaver make an excellent
supplement for my chickens. The rest of the
carcass can be cooked thoroughly and fed
to chickens, dogs, hogs etc.(cook well)
I've kept chickens and rabbits together
a lot. I have sometimes a lil problem with
ear mites in my rabbits. Liquid Sevin fixes
that, but much of it will kill your worms.
Incidentally, I find worms easier to sell
than eggs. Just put the word out to a
few fishers, and they will come!

[paintlady]

There is not much meat on a rabbit. I have raised both and you get more from a chicken. Besides, they get rid of pests like grasshoppers and the eggs are a nice plus.

[MaggieJ]

Originally Posted by paintlady

There is not much meat on a rabbit. I have raised both and you get more from a chicken. Besides, they get rid of pests like grasshoppers and the eggs are a nice plus.

I'm not sure what kind of rabbits you raised, Paintlady, but most meat rabbit breeds typically run 8 - 12 pounds at maturity. I get more meat from a 4 month old rabbit than from one of my dual purpose hens. But having both is a good idea... The hens are wonderful for keeping down the bugs and there is no egg like free-range home-raised.

[ET1 SS]

We have both.

We were just discussing earlier today, our plans for this next spring.

They both give you meat.
They both give you manure.

Chickens are big on eating frogs and insects through the summer, and also give you eggs.

Rabbits are big on eating grass and they also give you pelts.

For us it really comes down to whether we more want eggs or fur.

[sammyd]

We have both as well.
We do not run dual purpose chickens.
I prefer the chickens.
We raise our breeding rabbits on pellets and grow out the young in tractors on grass with pellets if the grass isn't the best.
Kinda nice way to mow the lawn.