Insane rabbit demand

[Duckfarmerpa1]

Once you get your farm page up...look out!! People will bomabarc you! I get texts at 2am! I forget to turn the notifications off. But, once you’ve got it up, anything you want to sell, evven the stuff you DuPont..people will ask! I even had a neighbor ask for our chicken pooh! We kindly obliged! We have wayyy too much of that!

 

[BranscumFarm]

Has anyone else been experiencing way higher demand in your area?
We live in northern alberta canada in what is called the peace region.

There's a good community of meat rabbits around here and there's normally ads for bunnies through the summer on our craigslist equivalent, kijiji. However this summer demand is so high that there's hardly any ads for bunnies up.

I posted all for litters I was expecting since they are all different variations of mixed breeds. I thought I'd sell a handful to cover some expenses. But it just blew up on me, the demand for does is crazy and bucks isn't far behind. I limited my waitlists for the unborn kits to 3 of each gender for each litter thinking that way we should cover all requests and hopefully put some meat in the freezer. But I've already over filled those numbers requesting does and almost full for bucks!

The first litter arrived a couple days ago and luckily there were 9 so that waitlist should be covered but HOLY COW!
I even had my prices up a bit high so this wouldn't happen and I still got told my prices were too low and I should raise them by one of the buyers getting the most does from me! I also had one guy that hasn't been able to find a buck for his adult does so he is driving FOUR HOURS up tomorrow to breed with my bucks!!! that's one way!!!
One hypothesis I heard is that people are panicking about a shortage of meat if the factories shut down for covid? I think maybe just boredom, everyone who ever considered getting into it has lots of time to get started now.

So let me know:
Where are located roughly?
What's you experience this spring compared to previous years?
What do you think is causing this shift?

I'm in Arkansas, USA. I always notice and increase in the spring time. This is when people want to get into rabbits. I raise registered New Zealands for meat and show.
I have stopped posting that I have for sale because I can not keep up. I do not take wait list. Just first come when I'm ready to sale. I will start taking deposits at 8 weeks once I have tattooed and did my first evaluations. I don't sale till 12 weeks. I like to see how they grow before sell. I'm working to better the bred and redNew Zealand is very rare in my area.
I have worked hard on my YouTube channel and Facebook, Instagram, Websites to get my name out. And it has paid off.

 

[Niele da Kine]

Hawaii here and there's a huge demand for pet bunnies this year, but I don't sell to pet homes if I can help it. These are English angora, they are not a child's pet unless the kid has some pretty high end manual dexterity to manage the coat care. Or an adult who will manage it for them, on the waiting list is a mom getting a bunny for her son but she wants the fiber for herself. The story about a kid buying a baseball bat for his mum's birthday comes to mind, except in reverse. I'll sell her a fiber bunny and if she wants to let her son make a pet of it, that's perfectly okay. Hmm, well, not perfectly okay but acceptable.

I've never had a waiting list before, but there's currently ten young ones who won't be old enough to send out for another three weeks and they've all been spoken for with a waiting list for some that aren't even born yet. I've got just about every quality adult doe bred and if those litters aren't enough, they'll just have to wait.

The bunnies get sold locally at eight weeks old to an experienced bunny person and at nine weeks old if they have to fly to another island. If they are going to an inexperienced bunny person, then I'll wait until they're 10 to 12 weeks old. There's even been some sales of older stock, that's rare since most buyers seem to want a "baby bunny they can bond with". As well as more interest in setting up breeding herds, which I'm all for since then there will be more English angora bunnies around when I need more stock and hopefully I'd be able to find it locally instead of a mainland import which is usually four to six hundred dollars just in shipping.

 

[Nao57]

I have been selling out of my FG kits since the virus also, we are in Florida....I think people are getting prepared for possible meat shortages.....and doing something to prepare for that possibly is better than waiting to see what is going to happen

I agree with you.

 

[Nao57]

I can share my observations with y'all, even though its a bit late.

For starters the price of meat in my area doubled this year during the covid nonsense. To me this was quite upsetting. We used to be able to get ground beef for 2.99 a pound. The variations of fat and leanness were all around that range. Then as covid is going up the meat price just shot up a dollar instantly. Then another dollar. And now its been settled at around 5.88 a pound in my area.

Pork and bacon is also up. EVERYTHING is way overpriced. And it shouldn't be. We used to be able to find those one dollar packages of pork last year. Now a couple months ago in the worst of the shortages the bacon price was no joke, around 8 dollars a package. These weren't very big packages. And there's a huge pig farm in our state down south.

The price of meat was carried up across the board with everything going up. So even the chicken price in my area is still about 5 bucks a pound. It should be half that.

There is no reason for this. Its just manipulation. People have shown how Amazon and others were raking in the cash from exploiting the people this way. The term for this is 'robber barons'. Way back in the 1910s and so on, many of you read how the robber barons would lock people in the factories for 16 hours a day. The modern twist is that they don't lock you up, but lock up the market so that only they can be the only ones in business.

But enough of that.

A lot of these companies saw how easily they could capture the market by using covid to shut out competitors.

So its very likely that these people will try this again.

There are tons of rumors and people saying they were told by others or God or in dreams that there would be a second lock down.

But keeping things simple...regardless of whether or not there will or won't be more mayhem,... (And there probably will especially around November...) the fact is the dream of America was never to get rich. They've rewritten history to make you think its about having a big house and buckets of money and everyone gets rich. That's not true. The American dream was to be able to live free and be independent and be happy without some king over you.

The home and backyard agricultural hobbies will greatly enhance your family and their appreciation for being good and learning how to gain and provide for themselves by being good with good habits WITHOUT predatorism.

So I would encourage you all to stay on this track and encourage it as much as you can with your families, even if none of this other mayhem takes off. I'd run into people who did church work in foreign countries before, some of them from places that we think are sometimes enemies to the US. And these people were shocked. They'd say that when they got out of the cities the people were the best people they could ever find anywhere. And they'd say that sure enough if you went to big inner cities the people were terrible. And the funny thing is people say that about our country also.

So there's a lot at stake, not just hunger. People that learn how to work without living off others will be greatly benefited by backyard agriculture.

But yes the 6 dollars a pound for meat really pisses me off. If its that high then heck I should do everything I can to do what I can on my own.

Think about how much it costs you to raise chickens in your own backyard compared to that six dollars a pound or 5 dollars a pound. The mass poverty they create is almost worse than any hunger going on.

 

[Niele da Kine]

Not to get back to the robber baron theme, but the chicken raised in the back yard - especially if it's done on scraps and bugs instead of purchased feed - there's no taxes paid on those dinners. Which means the overall system isn't that thrilled for folks to provide for themselves. So far that doesn't seem to have popped up much on their radar and hopefully it won't become illegal to raise your own.

 

[Baymule]

People used to raise a garden as a matter of life. Then it got easier to just buy it and people didn't want to do the extra work to provide for themselves. Anybody with a back yard can raise a lot of food for themselves and their family. Chickens and rabbits make perfect back yard meat raising animals. Maybe this is waking people up as to hw fragile our food chain is and they will continue to raise their own.

 

[JessicaAaron]

I have a small area next to my house and I have a garden there. Some insects have been destroying the growth of the plants for some days. I could not understand how to control this. Anyone help me

 

[Mini Horses]

Make your own spray, water, a few drops of dish liquid, a few drops of hot sauce. Or dust with sevin. I use an old panty hose leg....jus put sevin in it, then jiggle it around plants. It's like a cloud of dust, coats easily & lightly. Set the hose aside for next use.