On 12/25/2023 at 9:32 PM, chromedome said:Earlier today I'd made up a couple of rabbit terrines for holiday entertaining/gifting. I took the opportunity to get a meat/bone ratio for our current Flemish Giants, since we'll be doing a compare/contrast with other breeds next year. My start weight for two well-grown bunnies was 3.686 kg (a little over 8 pounds, so they were big ones) and the weight of stripped bones left over at the end was 496g or just over a pound. Quick math tells me that's a meat:bone ratio of just over 7.4:1. Not too shabby.
It occurs to me that I'd never followed up on that post. In the event, we have abandoned the idea of the mixed-breed rabbits. Although there's a practical case to be made for their early maturation, in practice, it was... hard. They still feel like babies at that age, so neither of us had the heart to persevere with the project. Even before "the incident" we'd gone back to all giants, all the time, and we'll pay the "heirloom breed" penalty in terms of raw meat production. We still get plenty of meat for our freezer in the run of a year, and the slightly higher cost of doing it this way is something we'll just deal with.
On that note, I've mentioned a few times that we've been haphazard in our record-keeping and that (to my frustration) we haven't had a really good grasp on our costs through the first couple of years. You can imagine how it grates on a trained chef's nerves to not know his food cost! So this year I've constructed a spreadsheet that tracks our income and expenses for the rabbits as well as the chickens, quail and garden. My rough math last year said that the rabbits we sold in spring, as breeders and pets, probably floated our little operation through the end of summer, so our costs per lb/kg should have been lower than in 2023. This year I'll be weighing our harvest as I go, and will have Actual Meaningful Figures (TM) to work from.
Right now the quail are our stars, as far as productivity goes. They're generating the equivalent of roughly 2 dozen chicken eggs/week, or $40-odd worth of eggs/mo at our prevailing retail price of $4.69/doz. The chickens have been averaging just 1 egg/day (the freeloaders!) but as the days become longer again that seems to be picking up. In the meantime, our quail are paying for both, at least in a manner of speaking. In practice we're struggling to use up this many eggs, so we hope to sell some. She's been advertising fertilized quail eggs at $20/doz for incubation (competitive with online suppliers), and has sold a first dozen already and is beginning to see more inquiries. She's also hoping to sell some for culinary purposes. Counting the dollar value of the eggs, as described, we're breaking slightly better than even at this point.
Currently we have just one small mixed flock, but as spring comes along she hopes to have separate flocks of some of the "fancy" breeds so we can sell eggs and live birds for each of them separately. She has just ordered a better incubator for our own use, because the original one her daughter bought was set to work for chicken eggs and didn't offer adjustable temperature or humidity levels (pretty crucial for good results). Live quail sell for $7/ea in our neck of the woods, so a small starter flock (say, a male and 6 hens) would bring in nearly $50. That's a pretty fair return when you don't have to pay for the eggs.
She's hoping to expand our little flock of chickens in spring as well. We only really need a half-dozen hens to keep us in eggs in the summer, when they're laying consistently, and we already have more than that, but she's thinking in terms of birds in the freezer as well (which reminds me, gotta try to find out what's wrong with our big chest freezer...).
As for the bunnies, to bring this back on point, we'll be breeding our does this upcoming weekend. Three of them will be bred with our new bucks here at home, and one will go into town with us for a "play date" with Samwise, a buck we sold as a pet last year. I expect it will be a real red letter day for him, though I'm less certain what the doe will think of it. 
I'll keep everyone posted sporadically as we go, and probably roll chicken/quail info into the same thread (because they're all part of "raising one's own meat"). We have a dozen quail in the freezer, since we culled the surplus males from our little flock, though I haven't cooked any of them yet. My GF has looked up some recipes but pulled a wry face and said "They're all gourmet stuff. Maybe just roast us a couple with Stovetop, and see what they're like?"
I pointed out that she has a literal personal chef, but got her main point. We'll start with something she finds familiar and comfortable, and branch out from there (though I'll happily entertain any quail-recipe suggestions you may have).