If you are raising meat rabbits, you need a meat rabbit system in place! A system will allow you to maximize the number of rabbits you can raise each year, saving you time and money in the long run!
Choosing to breed your meat rabbits whenever you’d like will only lead to chaos, as we know from personal experience. We’ve been raising meat rabbits for five years, and since year one, we have implemented this system.
If you are just starting with meat rabbits, have been raising them for years, or are wondering if they are a good investment for you, then this blog post covers everything you need to know! You will have a system in place and understand exactly what raising meat rabbits for high yields looks like!
Here are all the details…
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Understanding Meat Rabbits
First, we choose to raise our meat rabbits in cages in our barn so that we can breed them at specific times and keep them healthy from outside diseases. We do not let them roam around in a colony, and we do not pasture raise them, which you can read about here.
Second, we raise New Zealand and Californian meat rabbits, so this is our personal experience with these breeds. As our rabbitry has grown, we have kept some of the future generations as breeders, but we have also brought in new blood. It is a personal preference for many people whether they feel comfortable interbreeding their rabbits or not.
Third, we raise meat rabbits as a main source of protein for our family. They are delicious and nutritious! Our rabbits are not pets, but we certainly love them and treat them well. We do everything ourselves from the breeding to the butchering, and we do it all humanely as possible.
And last, don’t forget you can sell various things in your rabbitry to also help pay for your rabbit feed. If you are selling the baby rabbits, put an ad out when the babies are born and sell them after they wean from their mom at around 6 weeks old. You can make more if you have an official pedigree that shows the last 3 generations of rabbits. You can also sell rabbit manure, hides, etc., which I explain more about here.
Related Posts:
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6 Super Simple Ways To Make Money From Your Meat Rabbits Today
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Feeding The Meat Rabbits
We provide our meat rabbits with one full cup of food each day, or half a cup in the morning and half a cup at night. We only increase this amount to two cups when a mother is about 5 days from giving birth, and continue the extra food until she is weaned from nursing her babies.
The extra nutrition helps give her energy right before, during, and after birth. It also gives her more nutrition to help her milk supply come in and stay high. Never give extra food to your males or females that are not bred and pregnant because they can quickly become too large to perform adequately.
We also provide all of our rabbits with a handful of timothy hay each day and fill up their water. It is a daily task, but it does not take long at all.
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Breeding Meat Rabbits
Our rabbitry has slowly grown over the years to this number of breeding rabbits: 6 females and 1 male. We have had two males at times, but eventually found it unnecessary as our one male stayed very healthy and active. We found this number to be a sweet spot, where we can produce a high amount of meat each cycle (we will discuss the calendar system below) without it becoming too overwhelming.
When it is time to breed your rabbits, you want to aim for 3 to 5 fall offs. Bring the female to the male’s cage. After he falls off of her three to five times, place her back in her cage.
For an extra boost, put her back in with the male a few hours later and allow for one more fall off. This could potentially boost the number of babies the mother may have, as rabbits ovulate when the sperm is injected and do not have a regular cycle. However, the female may not like that and become aggressive. If this happens, remove her immediately.
The next day, do the same thing with the next mom. And then the next day, with the next. Do this up until you have bred all your rabbits within the same week.
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Pregnancy In The Meat Rabbit System
Meat rabbits will have a 30-40 day pregnancy, but most will give birth at 31 days after breeding. Add the nesting box to their cages at day 25-27 and provide ample amounts of hay and grass for them to add to the boxes.
A good mother rabbit will begin gathering the supplies and creating a cozy environment inside the nesting box. You will know that she has given birth when she has stopped eating her food, pulled out lots of her hair, and you see some blood remains.
You will also notice a cozy area in the nesting box that may appear to be moving or “breathing” slightly. Feel free to peek in and count the babies the next day, but do not linger. Hopefully, you have at least six babies in there. You could have as few as two or three, or as many as ten or eleven. We have even had 12 at one time! An average litter is between six and eight for young and healthy mothers.
Rabbits prefer to distance themselves from their babies so predators cannot find them. They will only nurse them when they feel safe and alone, so stay away and give her time to nurse them. It is very rare to see the mom in the nesting box nursing her babies, so trust the process.
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Weaning The Babies
After about a week, the babies will begin to grow hair, then their eyes will open, and then you will see them start to get curious and explore. I love how cute they are at about two weeks of age!
We allow our babies to wean from their mother naturally. That means we leave the food, water, and hay for the mothers as it normally would be. Eventually, the babies notice the food and begin nibbling on it. Once we see them eating substantial amounts of food and drinking water, we begin the weaning process.
The babies will stay with their mom for about six to eight weeks. After that, we remove one at a time, or one each day, from the cage with mom to a grow-out cage. This helps the mom slowly lose her milk supply and not suffer from an oversupply or mastitis if all her babies are removed from her on the same day.
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The Grow-Out Cage
While each breeding rabbit has his or her own cage, we then have two very large cages that stretch from wall to wall in one room of our barn. We call these grow-out cages in our meat rabbit system.
We move all the baby rabbits, slowly one-by-one each day, into the grow-out cage. In the grow-out cage, we have several large feeding dishes and waterers. Those are always filled to the top. We want these babies to start eating all the time. They eat and drink as much as they want until two days before butchering!
Depending on how many rabbits you breed at the same time, you will likely be filling up that cage pretty quickly. Make sure it has ample space. First, for example, two rabbits one day, then two more, then two more, etc. Or if you have three moms give birth, it will be three the first day, then three more the next day, and so on.
When the rabbits are about 12 weeks of age, you will need to sex them. It is helpful to have someone help you with this. While my husband holds the rabbit, I check their sex. This takes practice, so if you can’t tell right away, try waiting one more week. We move all the males into the second cage and keep the females in the current cage. This way they will not have a chance to start breeding with each other.
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Rebreeding Your Rabbits
After you have weaned and removed all the babies from the mother, allow her some time to recover before rebreeding her. We usually wait a minimum of two weeks before rebreeding all the rabbits to be sure they will get pregnant again with a large litter.
But also consider your timing! You want your other rabbits in the grow-out cages to be butchered so that you can move your new babies into their grow-out cages. If you remember that it takes 31 days of pregnancy and six weeks of the babies staying with mom after that, then you can time it perfectly.
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Butchering Your Meat Rabbits
When the baby rabbits have grown to four months old, it is time to butcher them. Remove their food two days before butchering day and their water one day before. This keeps things a lot cleaner when you are cleaning them out.
Butchering your rabbits is a two-day process. We use a “hopper popper” to humanely kill our rabbits. It snaps their necks quickly.
Start with killing ten at a time. If you do more than that, they will get stiff, and it will become very hard to clean them. After you have killed ten of them, then hang them up and remove the skin, guts, and everything inedible.
We save our rabbits’ liver to freeze-dry and powder, and then fill in capsules. We also freeze some of it to add to smoothies.
Then place the gutted rabbit whole in a bucket or large bin of ice water. All the rabbits will soak in this overnight to keep the meat tender and delicious. Move on to your next ten until all the rabbits are killed and butchered. Sometimes we have as many as 40 at a time!
24 hours later, it’s time to portion out your meat rabbits. Cut off all four legs and trim the middle section. You will have each rabbit in five pieces, which we place in a bag, vacuum seal, and set in the freezer. Now you can pull them out and enjoy them whenever you’d like!
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Replacing Breeding Stock
When should you replace your meat rabbit breeders? We do it around 3 years of age. They start to perform less as well. This is also a great time to decide if you will bring in new blood or use one of your offspring as a new breeder.
Remember, it takes six months before your meat rabbit is ready to be bred, both male and female. So, get your new breeding stock six months before you plan to move on from your older rabbit.
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Record Everything! The Key To This Whole Meat Rabbit System
The most important part of this meat rabbit system is having a simple way to record everything! I have a simple Word document that I set up like this:
First, list all your breeding rabbits (naming them is helpful for this record-keeping purpose) and the date they were born. This way, you can track when they are getting old and need to be replaced. Also, list who their parents are if you have that information.
Second, I write “Cycle 1 of 2025” or whatever the year is. Then list your breeding schedule: the date that each rabbit was bred, who they were bred with, and the expected due date (31 days after breeding).
When the babies are born, come back and write what day they were born on and how many were born. If a certain mother keeps underperforming, you will have the information to make a decision after a few cycles.
Third, list the expected date to sex the rabbits (12 weeks old) and the expected date of butchering (16 weeks or four months old).
Fourth, list the expected date to re-breed the rabbits again. Start a new category and write “Cycle 2 of 2025”.
An example of your breeding schedule may be “breed end of Aug, due end of Sept, butcher end of Jan” and then “breed beg Jan, due beg Feb, butcher beg of June.”
We can fit in about four cycles each year in our rabbitry. That is because we live in a very northern climate and our winters become too cold for our rabbits to breed. They usually take a break for a few months in the winter before we can resume again in the spring.
The cycles in this complete meat rabbit system allow you to have a predictable system in place so you can be prepared and on top of things. If you breed each rabbit at a different time, it’s hard to contain all your grow-out rabbits so that they don’t pick on each other. It’s also hard to be constantly butchering small amounts of rabbits and keeping track of everything.
This is what has worked for us the last five years! Let me know what questions you have in the comments below about our meat rabbit system, and best of luck with your rabbitry!
Kelsey at GoodPointGrandma
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