Rabbit Feed Recipe?

[kelsystar]

I'm interested in making my own rabbit food. I know that pellets are mostly hay - timothy or alfalfa - and hay is a whole lot cheaper than pellets.

Making my own is also the only currently feasible way I have of feeding organic. The feed mill could custom mill organic feed for me, but only by the ton. No way my buns could eat up all that in a couple of months! I have a few friends interested in splitting, but we are all small (very small) producers.

I'm most concerned about getting the right amount of salt and trace minerals. I also want a decent feed : meat conversion ratio. Is anyone out there making their own feed or know what ingredients I should use? A web search turned up nothing worthwhile.

Thanks!

 

[jamespm_98]

I would be interested in this topic as well. It seems most post are geared towards purchased pellets. I am assuming people kept rabbits long before pellets were availible. I read a story awhile back about a depression family in the 30's who said rabbits were their only meat source and the children would feed them from plants they picked each day walking home from school. If that can be done then I assume we should be able to grow, harvest and collect food for rabbits which would be both organic, cost effective and good for the rabbits.

 

[kelsystar]

Agreed. I know I could feed the buns on things that I foraged, but I'm also interested in making sure those fryers reach their full potential! There have been some posts on this topic on the Yahoo! Meat Rabbits group, but not a whole lot.

 

[freemotion]

I know we didn't buy pellets for our meat rabbits when I was a kid. I'll ask my dad, but I think we fed them oats and hay and a salt block, along with veggie scraps from the grocery store's throw-aways.

 

[Bunnylady]

I would be interested in this topic as well. It seems most post are geared towards purchased pellets. I am assuming people kept rabbits long before pellets were available. I read a story awhile back about a depression family in the 30's who said rabbits were their only meat source and the children would feed them from plants they picked each day walking home from school. If that can be done then I assume we should be able to grow, harvest and collect food for rabbits which would be both organic, cost effective and good for the rabbits.

Yes, rabbits were kept for hundreds of years before pelleted feeds became available. The problem is, once they were introduced, they quickly became the exclusive way people fed rabbits. Have you any idea how many generations of rabbits have been raised on pelleted feeds? Its a case of the feed being engineered for the rabbit, and the rabbit being engineered for the feed.

I witnessed the effect of this once, purely by accident. A weanling Harlequin doe escaped from her cage, and we couldn't catch her. In spite of the fairly active predator population around here, this rabbit survived on her own for about 5 weeks. When we finally did catch her, the difference between her and her cage-bound siblings was amazing. They had roughly doubled in size, she had only grown a little. She did grow some more, but never achieved normal adult size for her breed. In fact, she was so stunted from her time "living off the land," I was unwilling to breed her, for fear her small frame would create kindling problems.

I have a book, Raising Rabbits by Ann Kanable. It was published in the late 70's. There is a fair amount of discussion of the subject of rabbit nutrition and feeding a homestead herd, with a view toward not using commercial feed. I don't know how useful you might find it, but it's a place to start.