One of my goals here at my small suburban farm is to encourage people to grow their own food. Of course, I am more than willing to grow food for whom I can if they can't or don't want to put in the work. That's part of having a farm, eh? One of my favorite homegrown foods is rabbit meat and organs. For quality, flavor, ease, and sustainability, I don't think they can be beat on a suburban homestead. And they're a fairly rare delicacy today too!
Inside my own core communities here, I have sold or given rabbits to five families that I recall off the top of my head, with more families expressing interest. Of course, we all keep in touch about our programs and are all aware that a complete diet of rabbit is unhealthy, as any complete diet of any one food product would be. Rabbits are just the most efficient food production animal we've got going at this time, and even someone with an apartment balcony could raise meat rabbits.
Kids love helping with rabbits. Three of these rabbits are still in our breeding program, and a few others now belong to various friends.
I'm in love with rabbits as a source of animal protein. They take up so little space, eat such a wide range of anything green, and produce such high quality meat that they're hard not to love. The more rabbits I can share with my friends, the lower our average food miles within my community. The lower the food miles, the more wealth and value stays here with my people. More wealth for my people means a higher quality of life in my community. That's my bottom line: I want my friends and I to have the highest quality of life of anyone around.
My current rabbitry (that's what you call a rabbit farm) houses ten breeders, divided into seven does (female rabbits) and three bucks (male rabbits). I thought I was going to run six does and two bucks this year, but my girl Peaches turned out to be a dude. That's okay I guess. Rather than eating him and buying or producing a doe to replace him, I kept him and bought him a harem from another bloodline.
In my day to day diet, I equate rabbit to chicken. While the study linked below clearly shows that the nutrient profiles are not equivalent, rabbit tastes and cooks just like chicken. In my family we regularly switch rabbit into chicken recipes, and it's been extremely well received by our kids and our friends. My customers have all loved the rabbit meat I've sold them too. Just cook it a little slower than chicken, and you can't go wrong. People will often point out that a diet using rabbit as the sole animal protein can cause deficiency called "rabbit starvation." Which is obviously true of any imbalanced diet. If you don't eat well, you won't be healthy. Nobody I know advocates just eating rabbit, just like nobody I know advocates just eating eggs or spinach or cheese. You're not gonna have a good time with any of those types of diets.
My favorite recipe that Melissa makes is rabbit enchiladas. Literally all we do is sub in rabbit for the chicken in her old recipe, and it tastes amazing. Fresher than chicken, and packed with flavor. The flavor is comparable to chicken, but fresh and deep. Kinda how you wish chicken would taste after you have bland store chicken. For those that know, it's like the awesome flavor of heritage breed chicken, without the toughness of eating a mature bird.
Everyone thinks stew when they think rabbit, and I do plenty of rabbit stews. God basically made rabbits to be stewed. Melissa has done rabbit and dumplings, which was obviously amazing. My stews usually incorporate organs and/or sausage. The lean white meat of rabbits is super versatile, and works with every seasoning I've thrown at it yet. This particular one below had a rabbit and some organs with garden fresh onions, green beans, and chives with various seasonings and fresh mangalitsa pork sausage from my friends at Thrivestock Ranch in Oklahoma. It was an awesome light spring stew that I ate on for a few days. With good kitchen economy, we've been able to get nine individual meals off of one rabbit before.
Rabbit and sausage stew with fresh garden veg
The same rabbit and sausage stew
As a chicken fry, rabbit excels. Cook it a little slower than you usually cook your fried chicken, and it'll come out amazing. Here, I breaded it with a fresh eggs and Bob's Red Mill gluten free flour in the red bag with salt, pepper, and cumin. That type of flour sticks to meat a lot better than any general purpose wheat flour I've used. I can't wait to chicken fry some rabbit again.
Chicken fried rabbit belly
For sustainability, rabbits are far superior to chickens. In a typical meat bird operation, you're ordering chicks from a central supplier for a couple bucks a pop. They won't tell you their patented breeding mix to encourage you to breed your own meat birds. Those birds will be adapted to a GMO soy based industrial feed that comes from even farther away than your birds. Meat birds won't live long enough to make an egg you could hatch, and even in the rare case that they do lay an egg, they don't breed true. Rabbits, on the other hand, procreate dramatically quickly, and survive on any green stuff you can give them. Find me an industrial meat bird that'll survive on lawn clippings, I'll wait. For industrial and pastured poultry systems alike, you'll need a fair bit of space too. When it comes down to it, you won't eat chicken without major industrial development.
Rabbits, on the other hand, take up surprisingly little space. You could run a breeding pair and a grow-out cage on the balcony of any apartment I've lived in, and they wouldn't take ten minutes a day if you could resist snuggling with the tasty little sweethearts. You and your friends could swap breeding stock from different bloodlines every couple of years to keep down inbreeding and prolong sustainability, basically indefinitely. From a sustainability perspective, I have taken to always recommending rabbits. We err to overlook them in today's food-aloof culture.
If all that isn't enough, wait til I tell you about a rabbit's superpower... Woo-ee, can they compost some organic matter! I think I probably added a half a ton of rabbit manure to my trees and garden beds this year, and it was a fairly lean year as far as rabbit harvest goes. As a side hustle, I've seen folks sell rabbit droppings for $5 a pound! Imagine getting paid to make premium grade compost. Who wouldn't want in on that action? I'll try not to daydream about my half a ton of poo having a retail value of five grand. Rabbit manure is a staple here in any plant operation I do. My trees especially love the abundant ready-to-use fertilizer. It's a vital link in my interconnected homestead. The manure bins under my rabbit cages usually attract tons of black soldier flies, which are good composters and better chicken food. So when I add fertilizer to my many fruit trees, the chickens scratch through it all and till the manure into the ground where the worms drag it down and aerate the soil. It's all revolving around top notch food. Quality lean meat, quality fat eggs, quality fruits, and the soil holds more carbon and moisture to make it all beneficial to every part of the system. Nobody loses except some billionaire somewhere that wants my culture addicted to their food and drugs.
I've heard more than a few people tell me that "rabbit is poor people food." While I personally resemble that remark, I have asked each and every one of them to find me a "poor people restaurant" that serves rabbit. It's a delicacy! The elites of the world are dang near the only ones that can afford to buy a plate of rabbit. And here I am, so poor that I could eat em fresh multiple times a week. Nope, you won't convince us at Foxfire Orchards that we're not eating like kings, we know better.
So bottom line, I think rabbits would make an awesome addition to your homestead. The scalability, the food quality, and their contribution to so many parts of your homestead ecosystem make it an easy decision to start a rabbitry of your own. I hope I've been able to help open some minds to the amazing possibilities of rabbits.
Eat like kings, friends!