How to build and maintain the ultimate rabbit colony

welcome back to the homestead I'm sorry it has been a while but I'm right in the middle of this massive project um remodeling a house yeah we don't do little stuff here at the homestead we just go big and crazy [Music] but today it's going to be not about the greenhouse it's going to be the ultimate rabbit Colony video so I'm going to give you a full rundown of my rabbit colony [Music] thank you [Music] foreign do you want to watch this video if you're into rabbits you want to watch it because I'm going to tell you several years worth of mistakes so you don't have to make it so I'm going to show you why our Colony works and one of the highlights is I want to introduce to you um how to make an insulated Nest box and I'm going to explain why that's a big deal so I told you it's all the way about the rabbit colonies that's all we're doing but there's a reason I'm coming into the greenhouse so if you're not familiar with the homestead we highlight a year-round off-grid wallopini Greenhouse we went a full year through heat and through the cold without electricity so check out that those videos in the playlist but the reason I'm coming in here is I'm trying to find some lettuce because I gotta bait out the rabbits so you can just see oh you know what I'm gonna get this stuff I think it's called oh so you can see all the rabbits sorry I have about 12 minutes of light and so I'm trying to beat the clock right now my phone battery life is also dying and so I'm using my phone and then I gotta go over to McKenna's phone so super busy but you know what this is what you get we're not polished we make mistakes we tell you our mistakes and uh that's what we're doing so we're gonna give this nasty calendula I think is what it's called uh sorry if I offended you vegetarians out there all the love I just don't like it it tastes like rat poison and dandelions got together and had a baby okay so we're going to the rabbits right now all right McKenna come video me okay so as we start the video first of all this isn't calendula I know I said it was Becca just told me by the way my videographer is Mrs Homestead this is actually just lettuce that we let bolt we're going to collect some seeds but we're using this today to lure the rabbits out so come with us as we show our design so the first thing I wanted to tell you is that we built this originally for our Hogs and it works good because it's sturdy on the outside so you can't have you don't want predators to come in we also went and wrapped the top with wire because when we first started we were having issues with babies that were that were dying and we thought that there was cats and Hawks and we didn't know what I actually don't think it was that at this point I think it was an unhappy Colony so we're going to tell you a little bit more about that but come on let's see the rabbits first of all so the rabbits don't like me as much as they like Becca but if I have a little bit of food they'll come play so as you can see here we have about I think six mothers and all of these other ones are Friars that are ready to be sold to the meat truck you want to raise them up right about you know five to six pounds and so the way we have our Colony set up again it was an old Hog Run we we actually went and lined the bottom of it if I were to really be dedicated I would I would Scurry down and show you the floor the whole seat over here because I was digging oh come over here the whole floor well I don't want it so there's well there's a shovel right there and it's just right there okay it was getting some for the grow beds okay you see that so the whole floor is that wire mesh and we did that for specific reasons because when we first started out we had heard some people have success not putting a floor they they just had dirt floors and they would let the rabbits burrow through and and do their barrels in the actual raw dirt like in Mother Nature makes sense but as we did that we had so many tunnels collapse on so many babies and so Much Death and destruction it was chaos so we decided to go away from that and I'm glad that we did the one thing I will say part of that was not all uh the rabbit's fault and the Earth's fault for caving in we had a couple of bucks breeding bucks and we had some wild mamas so we just had unhappiness and chaos and I think that that's so maybe you could get by without the the metal on the floor well but and then they started escaping oh yeah we did have a few that weren't the worst girls so far that we couldn't even tell so I think I think when all said and done I think it was worth the expense and the effort of of lining the bottom with wire um I did all the wire a certain way so that when we want to come and harvest this this ground for our Greenhouse we can just come with a flat shovel and it's fairly easy to get this really awesome Mulch and take it out to the Garden well in our case the greenhouse so that's one of the one of the main things that I I would recommend the other thing is I mentioned we only have one Buck down here I can't tell you which one he is [Music] I think he's that one right it could be that one but so even though we have one buck and the six or seven does we learned by sad experience a few years ago when it was right at this time when they start breeding and our buck just died and so it was during the lockdowns and and everyone was like hyperventilating and scared and you couldn't find like buck rabbits it was so tough and so we lost like three months of peak breeding productivity because we did not have a spare buck so the one thing that we have done even though we like the colony is we have a second buck that we leave up in a cage I like the colony because it's a little easier to maintain in my opinion serious rabbit Growers they're all cages go ahead and put the hate in the comments cages is the only way it's fine but for us we were so sad because they were hot and I think they like going down into the boroughs that was that was why we did it right yeah so well in in E so I'll get i'll get into some of that too so um sorry what was my turn called I digressed you no it's sorry I'm like battling the sun here so so one of the things that we um like we wanted to have more than a couple of breeding doughs and to go through a winner in my opinion with you know seven or eight or nine cages that you happen to do individual water to that seemed more maintenance so the way that we have it set up over here now is we just we just use these bird feeders so you can get you know like probably four gallons of water here in the winter time we actually put the heated bases on it and so in theory it's a lot easier to water so so that's that's good and then the other thing um over here is for feed I just got one of our corrugated pipes we just cut into it and we just we just put their feet in here something else that we do that I think is very beneficial to the rabbits so we we save our lawn clippings we actually have leftover lawn clippings from last year that we have dried and in our little Greenery so every every day we give them pretty much an unlimited supply of dried lawn clippings so we limit the food so they don't get too fat but they have constant um the pellets yeah the pellets but they have constant access to the grasses and so that also helps to make for great mulch because you have all of that okay so Becca had mentioned the other thing that we didn't like and that leads into I think the highlight of this video is our insulated grow boxes so one of the things that we noticed last two years ago we had we had a couple of does and we had our buck in here and it was July and it was blasted hot and they were just in here just like off and just you know and we're just like this is like animal cruelty and so we we decided that that's when we decided to just try to make fully the Burl system work because before we were going to have two breeding does in the buck they were gonna make lots of babies and then we're gonna put the babies down here and the babies would grow up and then get sent to the meat truck or to the freezer okay but then we realized how hot it was so down here the one thing that the heat does for the males is it actually makes them go sterile if they get too hot there's no babies coming because the male it just zaps him and so we have the system down here it's naturally cooler they have access to go in the shade out of the shade in the boxes out of the boxes but in addition we have we have these setups where we have insulated nest boxes or a place where they can go to get cool or to get warm depending on the season so we just have um upside down um barrels from like these are for trees so what is that like a five gallon growing pot yeah and so well I think that's a five gallon that one's huge yeah so this one might be more like a 10 or 20. so what we did is we we cut a hole we turned them upside down and they're they're setting all the way on the on the metal so they can come inside of here but then it goes down to another pipe so they come in on one side they can go down to the bottom and then they have another a hole that that leads to one to one of these corrugated pipes and so from there they go through through that pipe into the insulated uh grow box a nest box so come with me and I'll show you that so that is where sometimes in the heat we see our rabbits actually hanging out there even when they don't have babies but part of the main reason is um is so that their babies can be insulated from the Heat or in the wintertime uh insulated from the cold so I just built a little Hutch and put some insulation on it because I want this that's already down in the ground so it's already going to be at a natural temperature I want to preserve that so I just put some foam board which I think is about an R5 to R7 depending on which type of foam you get but the brilliant idea because I've seen people have burrow systems in totes we just got some cheap Walmart uh coolers I think they were like at the time I'm sure right now with inflation that's going down they're probably you know twice as much as I paid for them I think I paid like 10 bucks uh 10 bucks a cooler so in in the coolers let's show you this one because this one's exciting I just got lights camera action yeah there you go okay my phone phone died so if the train of thought was lost actually you're used to that I find many squirrels in all my videos so okay but what we're gonna find right now is not a squirrel but a rabbit dad joke um so the exciting thing about our girl boxes is these cheap coolers they're ten dollars at Walmart um they might be a little bit more now but I just took that corrugated pipe I I do have some videos that I made a year and a half ago of me making them so if you guys enjoy this if this video actually has viewership and thumbs UPS um I'll do a separate video on how to make them but I just took that pipe up to the cooler got a Sharpie and drew a line and got a Sawzall and cut a hole and then because they're corrugated they just shoved right in here so let me show you look at that so so these ones are just about ready to go out into the main Hutch like come here come here little Rambo you see that so in here the mommy can come down nurse them and and it stays at a better temperature so like today is actually kind of cold well I mean 65 degrees it seems cold because it was raining but um down here is going to be warmer in the summer it's going to be cooler because it's in the earth and the these coolers naturally have insulation so it to me it's brilliant so let me show you another Nest box say hello to snowball right there you go it worked get down there I don't want to smash it okay so these other ones um actually I don't know no it's brand new oh they are not looking so clean yeah but there's the rain today darn it I hope your mama comes and clean some yeah they've been they're growing though does it rain leak on them in here no I don't know oh look at that wow like I'm saying for whatever reason they may or may or may not come on get down there but that's what we want so like like imagine if it was a hundred degree July day and your buck is at risk of having too much heat well he can simply come down here this gives another option for him for temperature because you want to maintain his Vitality as it were if you want to have babies so that's a good example of that so I think that this is a big part of the success in our colony okay so now we've hyped it up having said that there's there's disadvantages and tons of mistakes that we've made tons of them so if you do have a colony like right now we have we've tattooed all of the ears of our does but like Beck has been saying Nate we got to call the meat truck and so the problem is that if I don't and those get too too big we're not going to know which ones are the Friars needing to go and which ones um are are breeding stock and so the other thing is you don't want those young ones to grow up and to have more than one Buck or you're going to create the wild west when we had not just when we had the two bucks down in the colony but we also had a wild dough remember that Becca and Becca was the one that pointed it out because me I'm like I do great in chaos I'm like oh no let's have rabbits rabbits rabbits rabbits I wanted more more more but in process of doing more that was when we started having all of the the little babies that were getting strung out and we were losing so many of of these baby rabbits because I think that that this wild dough that we we didn't identify was wreaking havoc on him and the other second Buck they were fighting each other and trying to outperform each other um so by having more we got a lot less production so with the colony here like for example we have a bad dough right now and it's harder to identify which one of those does the bad mom so we figured it out and we separated her and we put her put her off to the side and and she had babies and sure enough she abandoned her her little litter so we're probably gonna give her one more try or we might just let her go if you had it your rabbits in cages you know specifically when you do or don't have a bad dough I think professional rabbits Rabbit Breeders they will allow their their rabbits maybe one time at tops a second time and if they're not performing they get rid of them so that's a downside to the Colony system but all in all I think that the colony system is great and I do like this setup I would I would recommend it if you have questions about it please put it in the in the comments and I'll answer you um if you have any comments if you like the video please like And subscribe that's the way to get this little message out okay that makes me motivated because right now I'm super busy so if I know you're out there I'll keep doing videos all right thanks guys foreign

Channel: Manti Homestead

Views: 18,579

Keywords: How to grow rabbits in a colony, Rabbit colony, Raising rabbits in a colony, New Zealand rabbit, How to grow meat, rabbits, How to grow meat rabbits, Raising your own meat, rabbits on a home stead, How to build a greenhouse, Provident Prepper’s, Greenhouse in the snow, Manti Holmstead

Id: XPf61mtrGzI

Length: 18min 59sec (1139 seconds)

Published: Tue May 23 2023