"Colony-Style" Rabbit Keeping

I mentioned in a previous post on Butchering Rabbits that we had raised rabbits for meat in a "colony-style" setting.  That is not, apparently a management style that is very well know or widely discussed as I have have had numerous contacts for more information about it.

Here is a re-print of some information on the subject we published on an ancient iteration of our Ranch Website.

This pretty much sums up my total knowledge about raising rabbits in the colony style.  The information is almost a decade old so you might want to do more research elsewhere if you're seriously interested in the subject.......

In early December of 2001 we gave up on the traditional, standard cage approach to breeding.  Nothing we tried had worked and we had not gotten a single live litter in 8 months of working with our fancy, pedigreed Satins. 

Typical caged approach to raising rabbits (how we started out):

In desperation we converted to a "Colony-Style" living arrangement for them, figuring that, if nothing else, the rabbits would be happier.  We also, over time, got rid of all those fancy rabbits and went with generic "white meat rabbits" from our local feed store for breeding stock - another excellent decision.  We now keep 4 to 6 breeding does and 1 or 2 bucks on hand, plus their litters.  The management changes have proved to be a great success for us.

"Colony-Style" Rabbit Keeping:

Colony-style rabbit raising is a meat rabbit management method that, at its most basic, is simply putting a group of doe rabbits and a buck or two in an escape-proof area and allowing them to do as nature intended.  We let ours share the space with our chickens in their large fenced pen and house.  The buns have a series of tunnels, runs, brambles and nest boxes in which to live and play.  Exactly 31 days (a rabbit's gestation period) from our conversion to this style we were presented with 3 fine nests of baby bunnies from our does.  The rabbits never looked back from there!

There are definite up- and down-sides to this style of keeping rabbits. 

To the upside, the amount of work for the keeper is efficiently minimized - keeping the communal feeders and waters filled is about it; also, the rabbits live a much more normal life -  running all over the place, hunting for food, interacting with others of their kind etc.  Another plus is that production of offspring can be maximized (see downsides).  The rabbits' overall health is greatly improved - allowing them lots of exercise, sunlight and space away from wire-floored cages, closed conditions and forced proximity to possible pathogens, they are much less likely to fall to the common diseases and ailments of traditional rabbitries.

On to the downside:

First, colony-style settings can be very rough on the does.  They are capable of getting pregnant again the day they give birth and in a pure colony situation they often do.  With no breaks, their bodies are under a tremendous amount of strain.  This fast cycling will yield the highest number of kits per doe per year (a goal the species certainly strives for in the wild), but you will also have to expect to replace your breeding stock much more frequently than with other management methods.

Two does relax in their colony-style setting

Second, there is no opportunity for micro managing your herd: forget about breeding calendars, special matings and such.  It is impossible to monitor or adjust the individual rabbits' feed consumption and harder to monitor their health.  Also, there are, generally, no opportunities for playing with the babies - at butchering time (at about 8 weeks of age) there are some essentially wild rabbits to contend with. 

This method is assuredly not for raising cuddly pet or show bunnies.

With all that said, we actually practice a MODIFIED colony style of management. We cycle our buck (or bucks) through the colony on a periodic basis but keep them in their own, separate (but adjacent) colony the rest of the time.  This dramatically cuts down on the wear and tear on the does.  It also allows us to regulate the number of litters and frequency of butcher days we need to have.  To be honest, with just 4 does and one buck we were harvesting 25 to 40 rabbits once a month and that was more than we could come close to keeping up with consuming! 

We also, from time-to-time, will take a just-weaned batch of kits (about 4 weeks of age), bring them in the house in a mini colony set-up and work on socializing them for the pet market.  Mostly in the spring, especially around Easter, it is well worth the effort for us to hand feed and spend time with a dozen or two baby bunnies so they can be sold tame as pets.

Here are some pictures of our rabbits and babies in their habitat...

   

August 2005 Update

As of this time we have dispersed our little rabbit herd to other breeders in the area but may get back into them again sometime in the future.  With enough rabbit in the freezer to keep us happy for a while, it didn't make much sense to keep the last 4 does just hanging around.

Butchering Rabbits

We used to raise rabbits for meat here on the ranch.  Once we overcame our initial start-up difficulties and converted to a "colony-style" system of raising them we ended up being so successful with them that we soon got overwhelmed.  The expression "breeding like rabbits" is more than just a cute saying.  We were butchering out 20-30 rabbits a month from just 4 breeding does and one buck.  It was crazy.  How much rabbit can 2 people eat? A lot, it turns out (especially once you run out of freezer space!).

Doomed by success, we soon got weary of the whole thing and sold off the breeding stock, getting out of rabbits all together.  That was almost 10 years ago.

It took a few years but we eventually came to miss fresh rabbit meat.  Not long ago we made friends with a very nice couple who live a few miles from us who raised rabbits to sell so, from time to time, we again had the opportunity to eat rabbit.  A few weeks ago they told us they too were getting out of the rabbit business and asked if we wanted a few of their older breeding does to butcher.  We worked out a trade: four rabbits for a couple of goat wethers and a duck drake.

The does were beautifully healthy, well-kept and quite large.  We put them in an enclosed area of the chicken coop we usually use for chick brooding for a few days until we could make time for a butchering day.  Butchering rabbits is a little different than poultry and quite different than butchering larger animals so here's a brief, fairly complete (ie graphic) photo essay on the subject.  Kathryn and I work as a team on this.  We are very efficient and and it goes very fast.

Fetch the Rabbit

 

Stun/Kill the rabbit with a quick, decisive blow to the back of the head

 

Remove head and allow the rabbit to bleed out fully

Skinning #1

Skinning #2

 

Skinning #3

Skinning #4

Gutting (do not puncture the innards!)

The Good Stuff (heart, kidneys, liver (bile duct still needs to be removed)

Cut up into sections: 2 leg/thighs, 2 front "quarters", 1 loin per rabbit

Pan o' rabbit parts, ready for frying/stewing etc.

New Beef

It's been a while since my last entry.  Over a month, in fact (as has been pointed out to me by several followers - thank-you very much!). 

First our satellite internet service went down and we were without service for almost 2 weeks waiting for the repair guy to come out.  Our service is with WildBlue and I'm not shy about saying that their customer service sucks. That said, they are the best of a bunch of bad options for anything above dial-up internet in our extreme rural area.  When we learned how long we were going to be without service we immediately called WildBlue's biggest competitor in the area; Hughes Satellite.  They told us they could be out in 2 to 5 days so we signed up.  We've got a business we're trying to run here and email and web site work is an integral part of it. Well, their customer service is even worse than WildBlue's and, despite numerous calls to them and their designated installation company it was several days AFTER we finally got WildBlue service back that they finally called to set up an appointment to eventually come out. Arrgh. 

I also had several trips off-ranch, including one to Phoenix to ship and pick up a couple of goat kids and a trip to Kingman AZ ( 5 hours each way) to pick up a small goat herd that was being disbursed.  Some of the goats and almost all of the genetics came from our herd so we were happy to welcome them back to the Ranch.

Then my sister and her husband arrived for a visit from Philadelphia.  We've been having a great time with lots of food-related tales I'll review here soon.  They leave tomorrow.

But TODAY we had a new arrival on the Ranch that I didn't have to go anywhere to get.  A brand-new calf was born to our Belted Galloway cow Bertie.  This calf will be our beef for 2013 (talk about advanced meal planning).  At least we're hoping it will be our 2013 beef.  We have yet to determine the sex of the little cutie but we have our fingers crossed that it's a bull we can castrate to a steer.  If it's a girl (heifer), we'll probably have to sell her as we are not set up to keep her from getting bred too early, and by her father before it is time to butcher.

Calf gets a drink

Bertie and new calf (LGD Donna stands watch)

Bertie (mom), new calf, and Boone (dad)

      Anyway, Bertie calved with no problems at some point during the day despite it being very windy(sustained winds in the 20-30 mph range all day with gusts over 55 mph).  This is Bertie's 6th calf for us in as many years.  You gotta love those heritage breed animals: tough, thrifty, great mothers and fathers and all-around easy to manage. Oh yeah, and very, very tasty!

Roast Duck Dinner (From Post Office to Plate) - Part 4

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Duck tonight!  Time to do the "final assembly" of all the components for our duck dinner, at last!

Three days have passed since we butchered the first duck and I start the day with 6 VERY nicely cleaned,  plucked and rested,  feet-on ducks.  I figure I have just enough room in my commercial convection oven to roast them all at the same time.  This allows me some economies of scale and conservation of energy consumption.

The first step is to make up a big batch of aromatic-rich mirepoix.  I used 2 lbs of carrots, one large head of celery, four medium onions, and one head of garlic,   I chopped all of this coarsely and added about a cup of fresh rosemary leaves, some salt and ground black pepper and tossed it to mix well.

Rough Mirepoix

To prepare the ducks I cut off the feet, necks, fatty skin flap around the neck and knuckles off the legs.  These all go on the bottom of the roast pans along with a little of the mirepoix. I then folded each wing back onto itself, tucking it under the body.

Next I filled the body cavity of each duck loosely with the remaining mirepoix, rubbed the exteriors with a little dark soy sauce, arranged them, breast side up, in the roast pans and popped them in the preheated 350F oven.

While the ducks cooked I started the wild rice pilaf that would accompany them at dinner.  I started by measuring out 2 cups of wild rice, covering it with water in a small sauce pot and bringing it to a boil then quickly draining it ("blanching"). 

While the rice blanched, I cut up another aromatic mirepoix (carrots, celery, onions and garlic), this time diced about 1/4" (garlic fine chopped) and began sautéing it in a little butter.  When it was almost soft I added some chopped thyme and rosemary to cook for a minute or so before removing it from the heat. I brought 8 cups of well-seasoned chicken stock to a boil.

I put the blanched and drained wild rice in a lightly oiled 2" hotel pan, stirred in the sautéed mirepoix and poured on the boiling stock. A quick stir to distribute everything evenly, then I covered the pan with plastic wrap followed by aluminum foil and popped it in the oven.

Back to the ducks.  After about an hour I turned each of the ducks so they were breast-down.  The mirepoix was browning nicely but not getting too dark so back in the oven they all went.

I checked the rice after an hour in the oven and it still had a ways to go but was coming nicely.

After the second hour in the oven for the ducks they got flipped again (breast side up again).  I often find that with store-bought ducks they are very close to being done at this point and a little crisping of the breast skin is all that is needed. These ducks were not nearly ready yet.  I suspect it was because of their age (quite a bit older than commercially prepared birds) but for what ever reason, they needed some more quality time in the oven.  The mirepoix was darkening and there was very little liquid remaining in the bottoms of the roast pans so I added a little water to each to prevent scorching.

To my surprise, the ducks took nearly another hour to cook sufficiently at which time I took them out, removed them from the pans to cool. 

I then set about deglazing the roast pans on the stove over hot flames with some red wine and water, scraping up all the brown bits. This would all go toward making the stock that would be made into a sauce for the ducks so, the deglazing liquid went into a stock pot with the feet, necks and mirepoix from the pans.  

deglazing a roast pan

I covered the parts with more water and put the pot on the stove to heat while I continued working with the birds.

By this time the rice was fully cooked and very fluffy.  I poured it out of the hotel and onto a sheet pan to cool, then put into the fridge.  I've found that wild rice will tend to sour if not cooled and chilled quickly after cooking.

Once cool enough to work with, I de-boned the ducks.  Starting by tearing off the first two joints of each of the wings, then cutting each bird in half through the backbone and breast and removing the mirepoix from the cavities (goes into the stock pot) 

I proceeded to pull out all of the now-exposed rib, back, hip and breast bones, being careful not to tear the meat or otherwise mangle the birds.  Most of the bones (which of course also go into the stock pot) came out easily so all that was left in each half was one leg bone, one thigh bone and one wing bone.  This makes the duck halves sit nicely on the plate, be very easy to eat and gives me more bones for the stock!

mostly-deboned duck half

The duck halves then went into the fridge to chill while the stock cooked.

All My Ducks in a Row

After about 6 hours at a low simmer, the stock was a rich brown color, smelled great and some of the bones were just beginning to fall apart.  

Duck Stock Simmers

Time to strain. After removing as many of the larger bones as possible I strained the stock first through a coarse china cap (conical colander), then through progressively finer mesh strainers and finally through a sieve lined with cheesecloth.  

I skimmed off as much of the fat as possible (reserved for other uses) and cooled the nearly-clear stock in an ice bath before moving it to the fridge to finish chilling.

Time to make the sauce.  Duck L'Orange is the classic preparation for roast duck with a rich orange-flavored sauce but the same technique can be used to make any type of fruity sauce.  Today I was going to make one with blackberries.

I started by making a piquant caramel by combining sugar and red wine vinegar and cooking it to a thick syrup and then to a medium brown.  This base is what will give the sauce much of its sweet-and-sour kick.   

Piquant Caramel for Sauce

While the caramel was reducing I pureed some previously frozen blackberries with an orange.  These I added to the caramel when it reached just the right point to stop the cooking process (CAUTION! This is a little tricky and can cause violent sputtering of the molten sugar if you are not very careful). 

I cooked the blackberry/caramel mix a bit longer to further reduce and concentrate the flavors then strained the base through a fine sieve to remove the berry seeds, pressing to get every drop of base I could.

I retrieved the cold stock from the fridge, skimmed off the little bit more fat that had congealed on the surface and put some stock in a small sauce pot.  I added some of my blackberry base and began heating the mixture.  There are any number of options for thickening this sauce but arrowroot is usually my tool of choice.  I like the glossy, semi-clear look of the finished sauce but in this case I thought I'd try something a little different.  I made a quick roux from some of the reserved duck fat and flour and also dissolved some cornstarch in cold water and used a combination of the two as my thickeners.  The result was interesting.  It had the full body and mouth-feel of a demi-glace brown sauce but also the sheen of an arrowroot sauce.  I liked it.  A bit of tweaking of the flavor (touch more thyme, little more vinegar at the finish) and the sauce was good-to-go.

Putting it all together.  It's almost dinner time but these are big birds and we've been picking at the roast duck bones all day so we opt to have just 1/4 duck each tonight.  The duck half goes onto a sizzling platter, skin side up, with a little water on the bottom (to prevent drying of the exposed meat) and into a 450F oven.  This will heat it through and crisp up the skin in about 10 minutes.  In the mean time I reheat some of the wild rice in the microwave, and make sure the sauce is hot and ready.

Once the duck was ready it was time to eat!  I added a few sliced tomatoes, fresh from our green house to complete the plate.  At last, our own duck dinner!

It was absolutely worth the work and the wait but now you know why, when I buy a frozen duck at the grocery store, Kathryn calls it a "convenience product" or even "fast food"!

Roast Duck Dinner (From Post Office to Plate) - Part 3

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The following day brought a fresh perspective, some new ideas and much better weather.

In evaluating the previous day's successes and failures we decided that:

1.  We needed to scald for longer than we thought and at a much higher temperature than is generally recommended. We think this is because our ducks are older than most that are harvested commercially.

2.  The ducks seemed to continue to loosen their feathers for a while after coming out of the scald so we would try streamlining the process through scalding on all of the birds were were going to do and then concentrate on removing the feathers as a separate project.

3. We needed to resign ourselves to the fact that if we wanted skin-on ducks there was going to be a serious amount of hand plucking work involved.  There was no magic gizmo (at least not within our reach) that was going to miraculously de-nude the birds completely.  Further research into commercial duck processing came across some other techniques that might have applicable merit.  One method: the easy feathers were removed after scalding and then the ducks were dipped into molten paraffin wax then into ice water to harden the wax which was then peeled off - taking with it most of the remaining feathers - sounded promising but it required a LOT more of the wax than we had on hand for this session.

After setting up our various stations for the day (see previous post for details) we decided to kill and scald 4 birds in short succession then work together on the plucking.  That would give us a total of 6 in the fridge.  Plenty to see if this was all going to be worth it.

Work progressed smoothly.  After killing and bleeding-out, we scalded the birds in the soapy water at 170-180F for a full 3 minutes and by the end some feathers were almost falling out on their own.  A quick check showed no signs that it was cooking the ducks.  Once all four were scalded and piled in a large bus tub, I began working on them with the Hillbilly Plucker.  They were still quite hot and the plucker got off a lot of feathers.  When the first one was as done as I could get it, Kathryn started the hand work on it while I "HIllbillied" the rest.

By the time I'd finished pre-plucking all four, she had the first one almost done.  Things were definitely going faster but it was still very fussy work.  Despite our super-scald, some of the feathers were still so well anchored we had to pull them with needle-nose pliers. Working together we plucked three of them until as done as possible, sometimes exchanging the birds we were working on.

"Here.  You take this one for a while.  I'm tired of looking at it"

Once the first three were done I started the gutting and Kathryn finished the last one.

When all four were plucked, gutted, washed off and in the ice bath we, again, moved inside to finish the work of peeling feet and singing hair (and pulling the occasional missed feather here and there).

All in all it took us about 4 hours to process the four ducks today and get them in the fridge to rest.  Half the time per-bird of the previous day's efforts, but still a lot longer than we had hoped.

Two days in the fridge and the ducks should be nice and relaxed and I can start treating them like food!

(To be Continued...)

Roast Duck Dinner (From Post Office to Plate) - Part 2

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The thing about eating roast duck is that you really need that nice crispy skin to complete the dish as a whole.  We raise and butcher about 30 Cornish-Rock cross cockerels (male chickens) a year.  They are an amazing meat bird going from hatchlings to table in 8 weeks or less.  Their feed conversion rate is astounding with most of what they eat going directly into muscle growth.  Anyway, when we butcher the chickens we skin rather than pluck their feathers.  It's very fast, easy and have never missed eating the skin even once.  I knew this wouldn't be so with the ducks.

Plucking birds is messy hard work, and especially so with waterfowl like ducks.  The traditional way to pluck birds is:  Kill and bleed the bird, give it a quick dip in very hot water, yank out the feathers.  There are a number of poultry plucker machines of various sizes and duty ratings available to help with the "yanking" part.  They range from several hundred dollars to a few thousand. We were only planning on butchering out 10 drakes at most and it didn't seem to make any sense to invest in any of these machines.  On the other hand, we knew all-hand plucking was going to be a real chore. 

A little online research came up with a  gizmo variously called a "slum- ghetto-, or hillbilly-plucker".  It was a home-made attachment for an electric drill made from a PVC pipe fitting, some rubber bungee straps and a bolt. There were a few YouTube videos of them in action and they seemed effective (on chickens at least) so I splurged on $20 in materials and cobbled one together.

Scalding the birds is also messy and the whole process is much better done all outdoors.  These ducks were getting BIG and I was going to need my big 15-gallon stock pot for the hot water.  Well I didn't have any kind of burner big or sturdy enough to hold that pot except for my candy stove and NO WAY was that going outside for a slaughter day!  Online shopping to the rescue again and I found a very nice LPG Cajun Cooker Burner designed for handling large crawfish-boil dinners.  Perfect. Pass the credit card, please and thank-you.

Once all the necessary equipment had been delivered, built or, otherwise readied we set the date and prayed for good weather. 

The night before Slaughter Day we closed as many of the ducks as we could wrangle into the chicken coop area and took away their food. This makes for a much cleaner butchering experience and lessens the severity of one of the many unpleasant aspects of the process (the gutting).

The following morning, as soon as possible after all the morning chores, we set up our poultry processing station near the pen where the birds were being held.  I'm not going to go into great detail about our set-up(see pictures below) but there were the killing cones, the scalding station, the hillbilly plucker station, the hand/finish plucking table, the gutting station and various washing and chilling buckets, tubs, knives, cutting boards, thermometers, timers etc. 

Our plan was to catch and kill the first duck and while it was bleeding out, catch and kill a second.  We would then take the first and scald/pluck and gut it while the second one bled.  The first one would go into the ice bath to chill and we'd scald/pluck and gut the second one.  With any luck we'd be able to get a third one killed and hanging somewhere during all of this and just keep working our way through all the drakes we'd selected.

<Sigh>  My wife has a saying "People plan: Goats laugh".  It's a reference to the fact that despite all best efforts goats will usually come up with a way to outsmart/outmaneuver/out-something we humans with the theoretically more highly developed brains and those marvelous opposable thumbs.  This day the people planned and the ducks laughed.

To start with, the weather could have been better.  It was way too windy for comfortable outdoor work, making everything harder than it should have been.  The plastic wrapping on the stand for the killing cones was flapping all over the place, the burner for the scalding pot kept wanting to blow out etc.  It's a busy time of year for us  and we weren't exactly sure of when the next opportunity for a couple of open days for a project like this might be, so we forged ahead anyway. 

The first part of the plan went flawlessly the ducks were easy to catch and calmly went to their demise.  We were concerned that the killing cones we had made years before for chickens would not be big enough for the ducks but they worked perfectly and the first two volunteers died quickly and cleanly, bleeding out well without any fuss or drama. 

  

Next up: Scalding...

Remember I mentioned that plucking waterfowl was especially messy and difficult?  I'd read that in a book.  A couple of books, actually. I had NO IDEA how difficult they were talking about!  Try just this side of impossible!  The best info I could glean suggested scalding for maybe a minute in 140 degree water "just until the tail feathers come out easily". Ha, ha, ha, ha. Very funny! One minute in the hot water and the tail feathers wouldn't budge. Two minutes and one feather came out with extreme effort.  Three minutes and a small handful did come out as did some of the large wing feathers.  I was afraid that any longer and I was going to have boiled duck. 

Onto the Plucker...

I'd mounted the drill-wielded Hillbilly Plucker on one of the forks of my tractor's forklift attachment.  It was as solid as a rock and I was able to set it at a comfortable working height.  There was no easy electricity where we were working so I'd brought over one of our portable generators to power the drill.  It fired up on the first pull and the plucker spun into life but after a few minutes of trying to hold the very heavy, soggy and hot bird against the flapping fingers I realized that this was not going to be as easy as all those YouTube videos had made it look. In the videos they were, of course, plucking chickens and the feathers absolutely FLEW off them, leaving 95% denuded carcasses in about 2 minutes flat.  Definitely not so rewarding with ducks.

After several very soggy minutes of holding the bird against the flappers I'd gotten off maybe 40% of the feathers and had gotten completely soaked in the process.  Imagine that: soaking wet bird meets fast-flying-fingers.   At least as time went on it was cool water instead of very hot water I was getting sprayed with.  Anyway, I tried with the grain, against the grain and  perpendicular to the grain of the feathers, but nothing gave that satisfying cloud of flying feathers I had been hoping for.  I was making progress especially on the middle-sized feathers (the big ones definitely needed hand pulling and the tiny fluff feathers seemed determined to stay no matter what) but it was slow and tedious. 

After another few minutes of work we decided that the bird was as plucked as this method would accomplish so we moved it to a table and Kathryn started hand working it while I scalded the second duck.  I'd left the burner under the scalding pot on full blast and despite the wind fighting it the temperature had gone up quite a bit during the protracted plucking work.  It was almost to 170F but I figured "What the Hell..." The lower heat wasn't great so what did I have to lose?

Again with the timer... one minute - nothing, two minutes - barely a budge on the feathers, three minutes - seemed about right again so off to the plucker we went.  This time I actually did get a couple of explosions of feathers off the bird and the plucker was definitely getting more of the feathers off with less work.  After a couple of minutes I had about 80% of the feathers off (which sounds pretty good until you think about the remaining 20% as being the hardest ones still needing to be dealt with).

By this time Kathryn had about half the first bird once-over hand plucked and it was starting to look a lot more like food than road kill so I joined her and we each worked on a bird until they were close to done.  We figured we could fine-tune them inside, out of the elements, so I quickly gutted them (saving the hearts and livers), tossing the heads to the dogs.  

After a fresh water rinse we transferred the ducks to an ice water bath and moved the operation indoors.

Inside, in more comfortable working conditions, we were able to get the rest of the stubborn feathers persuaded out, get the feet peeled of their outside skin layers and, using a Mapp gas torch (hey, it's all I had), singed off the remaining hairs.

Finally they looked like something that belonged in a kitchen and I had hopes that this whole fiasco was going to be worth it.  Maybe.  Time expended: 4 hours for two people to ready 2 ducks.  Ridiculous!  The ducks went into the fridge for their resting period (time to allow the muscles to pass through rigor mortis).

We obviously needed to improve and refine our technique but were way too beat to try any of our new ideas until the next day.

(Continued here)