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permaculture - Re: [permaculture] Producing adequate livestock feed on site. ProjectHeiffer.

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  • From: Jennifer Nazak <jnazak@yahoo.com>
  • To: "permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Producing adequate livestock feed on site. ProjectHeiffer.
  • Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2012 12:35:18 -0700 (PDT)

I wonder if part of the problem in that case was that the rabbit population,
after several years of quite a few people in the area keeping rabbits, had
devolved to a monoculture or otherwise insufficiently diverse population
which rendered it vulnerable to the scourges you describe.

As with so many situations, preserving diversity is important for longterm
viability. I've heard that indigenous Peruvian tribes grew thousands of
different types of potatoes. Monocultures are something we constantly have to
watch out for. It's easy to see how a monoculture could evolve over time, as
people have success with a certain species (be it plant, animal, or what have
you).

jenny

"Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it
passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are
marked by changes in the face of Nature." -- Robert Louis Stevenson, _Travels
with a Donkey_


________________________________

All went well for a number of years and there were quite a few people here
keeping rabbits. From about 1992 things went downhill fast. A cat dragged in
a wild rabbit with mixomatosis and that decimated our herd. Then it seems
the forestry service here brought in another virus (from China?) to cull
wild rabbits in forestry areas and upon that all the people we knew to have
had rabbits ran into very severe problems and gave up on them completely if
they did not die out under their own steam. Litter sizes dropped and young
rabbits died before reaching maturity. 




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