Profitable Rabbit Farming
I am sharing this information with you based on my personal experience as a rabbit farmer/breeder. I went into rabbit farming few years ago and found it so interesting that I cannot let it go again. To show my interest in it, I wrote a small book on it in PDF format and the image with this post is the cover page of the book I wrote. I can give the book to anyone free of charge if there is a way to upload it here.
FUNDAMENTAL ISSUES TO BE ADDRESSED IN RABBIT FARMING:
1. Housing
2. Feeding
3. Breeding
4. Marketing
5. Reducing mortality to 0 or 10%
Let us start:
HOUSING
The best way to house rabbits is through cage system, cage system is either increase horizontally or vertically. Horizontally raised cage is just one step while vertically raised cage is of minimum of 2 steps. As the wood and net are the common materials for cage construction here in our country, there is need to properly make use of these materials to get desirable result.
Hardwood must be used to disallow rabbits from chewing them and for durability. Where softwood is used, it has to be laced with net. Otherwise rabbits chew them up in no time.
Now, let us talk about the dimension of your cage:
The rule to apply has to do with, the size of each room/compartment in a cage. Each room should be of length: 40cm, Breadth: 35cm & height: 40cm to allow rabbits have enough space to dwell. The whole cage can be of length 2meters, breadth 35cm and height of 40cm excluding the standing. The cage has to be raised above ground level by 50cm to allow free fall of manure and disallow contacts of insects with the rabbit cage.
The floor of the cage upon which the rabbits dwell must be made with net. You will need two types of nets here: the two types of net you need are in the image below. Make sure you placed them upon each other for flooring. Then let each room/compartment of the cage has a separate lock.
This is because rabbits are very territorial at adult stage and also to disallow unauthorised access to rabbits and the unpalatable consequences. Take for instance, if an adult rabbit should go into a room belonging to another rabbit, fight then begins and you as their owner try to intervene may be injured as they can transfer their annoyance to you unintentionally.
Now at this juncture, we are almost true with the housing, the few things
remaining under housing are:
No: 1
Let each leg of your cage be placed inside a bowl containing waste engine oil to
disallow insects mounting the cage to disturb/ attack rabbits
No 2
Let nothing connect your cage to the ground floor thereby providing access to insects
No 3
Place your cage in a cool and dry area with good ventilation
No 4
Make sure that you supervise the construction of your cage to ensure that the inner parts are smooth with no pointed area that can injure rabbits. Rabbits at time run around inside cage when they are happy.
I will continue from here in my next post to handle Feeding. Let me know if I am starting rightly as this is my first post. Thanks and God bless.