Urban livestock keeping and urban farming are growing and often very earth-friendly trends. As previously reported by The Inquisitr , chickens have become increasingly abandoned by hipster farmers at animal shelters. The time and money commitment with keeping chickens, rabbits, or any other type of livestock becomes too daunting for some novice urban farmers .
The Inquisit r recently sat down with Hostile Hare owner Nick Klein to discuss small livestock keeping, homesteading, and prepping habits which work equally well in both an urban and rural environment. Klein is preparing to take his Hostile Hare services nationwide and will be appearing at the Arizona Survivalist/Prepper Expo in August.
IQ: Are your workshops geared to novice farmers and preppers, or will veteran homesteading families learn new skills from Hostile Hare services as well?
Nick: These workshops are geared towards those getting started raising rabbits. Even if you’re a seasoned rabbit farmer, you can benefit from another view point and another opinion. It’s been my experience, though, that no one has integrated livestock, gardening, and power production like we have at Hostile Hare.
Rabbits are the key to efficient food production. Rabbits will produce 320 pounds of live offspring per female and only require six square feet of living space. I can produce over 4000 pounds of live rabbits a year, I propose a live food storage system.
IQ: As noted on your website, rabbit keeping is even a viable options for Americans who live in urban areas or are forced to deal with HOA rules in suburban areas. What specific rabbit keeping tips can you give to urban farmers?
Nick: Rabbits are the perfect HOA friendly livestock. If you have a 3×2 foot area on a patio or in a spare bedroom you can raise 960 pounds of rabbits in a year. They are quiet, naturally clean, and can be passed on as pets should a conflict of purpose arise. Just keep the poop pans cleaned and the rabbits happy, and you’ll never draw attention. Rabbits are fairly simple to prepare to eat. A novice will have an oven-ready bunny in five-ten minutes of it being alive. I do recommend a salt brine overnight to offset the muscle tension. You have to remember, all meat purchased in the store has been allowed to decompose slightly to tenderize it.
IQ: What prompted the creation of Hostile Hare?
Nick: I have always been an alternative fuel junky. I’ve experimented with everything from electrolysis to used vegetable oils as fuel sources. I was studying gasification, a process for turning biomass into fuel through pyrolysis and reduction, when I saw an opportunity to improve the process.
Instead of chipping wood or compressing saw dust or using harvested corn for the feed stock biomass, I wanted to use a biomechanical approach. So I started raising rabbits to turn unorganized grass clippings, weeds, some twigs, veggies and some fruits into organized compressed pellets … rabbit poop.
I started with four does and a buck. I always ate wild hunted rabbits growing up, so I figured I would just eat these bunnies. Little did I know that each breeding female is capable of producing 64-80 babies a year! That’s enough meat for an adult human to survive on. So I started selling the offspring and found there was demand. I soon grew the operation to 50 breeders, then 70, and I now have the ability to produce 700 head a month.
[Image Via: Shutterstock.com ]