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

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  • From: "John D'hondt" <dhondt@eircom.net>
  • To: "permaculture" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Producing adequate livestock feed on site.ProjectHeiffer.
  • Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2012 00:06:43 +0100


I don't think inbreeding was the problem. Some ten years beforehand there was a big push from the dep of ag to start breeding rabbits to increase farm incomes. At that stage all kinds of breeds were imported from Flemish giants to Californian whites and everything in between. The main push failed because there was really no market for rabbit meat. (the same thing was done with vineyard snails, deer and ostriches and all those came to nothing as well). But anyway there was a huge variety of different breeds freely available when we started here.
Also, when I mentioned quite a few people I mean maybe twenty in an area of maybe twenty square miles. And none of these people had huge numbers of animals. They were all for home use and maybe some bartering.

As to monoculture and potatoes. I try to grow a couple of dozen new potatoes out from carefully hand pollinated seed every year. Have found nothing spectacular yet except for disease resistance.
John

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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