Is Raising Rabbits Profitable? Analysis of Farming Profits and Prospects

Whether raising rabbits can make money involves many aspects. If you simply calculate feed costs and labor costs, there is money to be made. However, the actual cost of rabbits is not like that. The feeding cost of breeding rabbits, averaged across the rabbits that survive, is one part of it. In addition, there are vaccines and some medicine costs, and the feed and labor costs consumed by rabbits that die are not included in the calculation.

Plant Forage Grass

Start by planting forage grass, take one step at a time, and advance steadily. This will help you reduce costs and increase profits in rabbit farming. Rabbits are grass-eating animals and do not need a lot of concentrated feed. If you rely on buying commercial feed to raise rabbits just to take it easy, then you had better not raise rabbits at all.

Build a Biogas System

Human and rabbit manure and urine, household garbage, and wastewater are all raw materials for producing biogas, which helps keep the rabbit farm environment clean. Biogas can provide convenience for daily life, cooking rice, stir-frying vegetables, boiling water, and heating bath water. Biogas residue can be used as a base fertilizer for planting forage grass. Biogas slurry can be used both as a foliar topdressing and as a biological pesticide. Biogas lamps can be used to kill pest moths. Biogas slurry at an appropriate concentration can kill pest larvae and eggs, and can also be used to kill bacteria. In this way, you do not need to buy pesticides, and you also save the expense of buying pesticides. To make it easier to clean out the biogas residue, it is best to use a solar biogas tank. This kind of solar biogas tank is better than an ordinary biogas pit and also saves more money, and it can be used continuously for more than 20 years. Ordinary biogas pits are often usable in the first year, still usable in the second year, and unusable in the third year. Many biogas pit users report exactly this. Solar biogas tanks will not have this problem. Moreover, even during the coldest winter weather, they can still produce biogas normally. Biogas slurry also has another wonderful use——adding it to drinking water for rabbits to drink can promote rabbit growth and development and also prevent disease. The rabbits basically have no diseases, which saves medicine costs.

Site Selection

You cannot raise rabbits at home, because farming families have the custom of worshipping gods and setting off firecrackers during festivals. Rabbits are timid, and the sound of firecrackers is high noise that will frighten the rabbits. Rabbits that are eating grass will stop eating, which affects growth. A doe in the middle of giving birth will stop giving birth, resulting in difficult labor, stillbirth, or retained placenta. A nursing kit will bite the doe's teat hard and be bitten to death by the doe and swallowed into her belly. A buck in the middle of mating will stop mating, which affects breeding. When choosing a site, choose a place with open terrain, high and dry ground, far from homes, schools, factories, mines, and processing plants, with clean water sources, good air quality, no pollution, and convenient transportation, and at a distance of more than 500 from major roads, as the rabbit farm. After choosing the rabbit-raising site, first build a perimeter wall. Rabbits are afraid of dogs. Once you have built the wall and installed a door, keep the door closed normally and install a doorbell. When someone comes, ask them to ring the doorbell. This keeps outside dogs outside the gate, and petty thieves also have a hard time getting in. The rabbit-raising site should preferably be connected to the forage grass planting base to reduce the time spent transporting forage grass.

Construction of Breeding Sheds

In order to reduce costs while also benefiting rabbit growth and reproduction, when funds are insufficient, first build a large shed. The shed should match your rabbit-raising scale, but the walkways must be sufficiently wide.

Black rabbits can be raised in cages or on flat indoor floors. For flat indoor raising, note that rabbits are good at digging into the soil and making holes, so the surroundings should be tiled, there should also be a cement floor, and doors and windows should be double-layered: one layer is a wooden door and glass window, and the other door is a stainless steel screen door, with stainless steel screen windows. The wooden door and glass window are for keeping warm when the weather is relatively cold, and the stainless steel screen door and screen window are for ventilation when the summer weather is hot. In this way, it is helpful against natural enemies such as dogs, cats, and snakes entering the room. Raising black rabbits in cages helps improve land utilization. It is generally a three-tier structure, with each tier having two cages, three cages, or four cages. The manure boards should be placed at a slant, higher in front and lower in back, extending 5 cm at the front and 10 cm at the back. This helps clean the accumulated manure on the manure boards. Accumulated manure releases ammonia gas. Ammonia gas is a toxic gas that has harmful effects on the air and is bad for the breathing of both the keeper and the rabbits. Rabbit cages can be arranged back to back, with a distance of 80 cm to 100 cm, and the length should match the rabbit cages. To reduce the trouble and time of cleaning manure, dig and build a manure and urine ditch behind the bottom-layer manure boards of two rows of rabbit cages. The manure and urine ditch should be high at one end and low at the other, sloping from one end to the other, with a certain slope to help flush the rabbit manure and urine in the ditch. The low end should be connected to a sewage pipe so that when flushing the rabbit manure and urine, it can enter the biogas tank together with the water.

Scale Farming

There must be a certain scale. Without a certain scale, you will not make money. At the beginning, when you do not yet have experience, the farming scale should not be too large. It is advisable to use 100 foundation does and 25 foundation bucks. The rabbit breed must be chosen correctly. It is best to choose black rabbits, because black rabbits reproduce very quickly, with 5-8 litters per year and an average of 8.5 kits per litter. You can select and keep good breeding rabbits from the kits of the third through sixth litters raised that year. Keep the prettiest, fastest-growing, most adorable female kits and male kits with evenly distributed teats for breeding, selecting and keeping 2-3 kits per litter. In the second year, you will have more than 1,000 breeding rabbits able to produce baby rabbits. By then you will also have experience, and at this point you can begin to renew your own breeding rabbit flock and also sell breeding rabbits. Raising rabbits this way means, first, not buying commercial feed; second, using very little medicine; and third, improving work efficiency. One person managing 1,000 does and 250 bucks is not tiring.

Making money from raising rabbits comes from multiple aspects: first, saving costs and expenses; second, gaining from the rabbits' reproduction rate and survival rate; third, gaining from the rabbits' rapid growth and development; and fourth, gaining from market price opportunities when selling rabbits. The combination of multiple aspects together produces economic benefits and social benefits. Economic benefits and social benefits are combined together. Without economic benefits, there are no social benefits; conversely, without social benefits, there are also no economic benefits. You should publicize more what benefits there are to eating rabbit meat, especially what benefits there are to eating black rabbit meat. When people who buy your breeding rabbits all feel that your breeding rabbits are good, produce many kits, the kits grow quickly, develop early, and get sick less often, and this is recognized by society, then very good economic benefits will be produced. In addition to publicizing the benefits of eating rabbit meat, you should also publicize methods for cooking rabbit meat. The cooking method for black rabbit meat is the simplest: it can be stewed plainly with a little table salt and then eaten, with a rich and delicious taste, and no gamey or earthy smell.