Expert Advice For Starting A Rabbit Business

Expert Advice For Starting A Rabbit Business LIVESTOCK Exotic Animals After buying one doe rabbit as a pet for his kids Randy Nierling Blair Wis soon ended up with a full-time job as a rabbit farmer with 700 cages and a manure pit “Rabbits really do breed like rabbits ” jokes Nierling “Our first doe had 8 doe babies and everything grew from there ” Housing those 8 and their offspring quickly led to an addition to the garage for 30 to 40 cages Gradually the yard filled with another 50 to 60 hutches Deciding to go full-time with the rabbit farming Nierling went from an acre and a half to a small farm with a 35 by 240-ft barn in 2010 “I had 700 double stacked cages and I had only filled half the barn ” he recalls All those rabbits meant a lot of manure With technical help from his county’s land conservation agency Nierling was approved for financial assistance to build a manure pit “It was a 120 by 40-ft pit with a 350 000-gal capacity ” says Nierling “It was designed to be pumped once a year We flushed rabbit manure into gutters and then by gravity into the pit I thought about using gutter cleaners but rabbit manure is extremely corrosive and would have corroded them away in a few years ” With housing and manure handling taken care of Nierling continued to work on productivity After trying numerous feeds he found one that seemed to work Large 4-ft fans installed at one end of the barn improved air quality and reduced disease As more things fell in line time on feed decreased from 14 weeks to 10 or less Most rabbit breeders he talked to waited until does were 8 to 9 mos old before breeding He reasoned that he was marketing rabbits at 9 to 10 weeks at a 6 to 7-lb weight so why wait so long to breed “I pushed breeding to about 4 mos of age ” says Nierling “We used to wait to breed dairy cattle when they were 24 mos ; now they’re already calving at that point ” The shorter timing presented few problems perhaps losing one litter out of 25 The work involved was a bigger problem Three times a week Nierling would pull 30 does out of their cages put them in with bucks for 5 hrs and then back in their cages “I regret double stacking as that added a lot of extra labor ” says Nierling “You need a step ladder to climb up to reach does in the upper layer ” Another problem is the tight profit margins Nierling was sending a batch of rabbits weekly to a central Iowa processor A truck would pick them up at a nearby town “I got $1 59 a pound live weight ” says Nierling “If I had lived closer to the processing plant I could have delivered them myself and been paid $1 00 a head more ” He was selling 25 000 to 30 000 rabbits a year but he estimates he was spending 8 to 10 hrs a day 7 days a week with the rabbits “I was making only 50¢ an hour ” says Nierling “An extra dollar a head would have really helped ” Nierling was trying to find ways to reduce labor when his health failed and he ended up on kidney dialysis several times a week “I had to close down the rabbit operation sell off the equipment and let the farm go ” says Nierling “I spent much of 2014 and 2015 in the hospital ” After getting a kidney transplant Nierling is slowly recovering his health While he doubts he will start raising rabbits again he has advice for those who are interested “Set your business up close to a processor keep labor to a minimum and find a market for the rabbit manure ” says Nierling Contact: FARM SHOW Followup Randy Nierling P O Box 202 Blair Wis 54616 ph 608 487-0644

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