A Farmers Tale-Rabbit Farming

In an interview with Joy Ful of The Farmers Voice, rabbit farmer Wilfred Allo, answers questions about his reasons for building this mini-livestock business:

What is it that prompted you to get into rabbit farming?
The main reason why we went into rabbit farming was because just over a year ago when there was the bird flu scare, we ran into financial problems because we had heavily invested in poultry farming. We realised that it was not good to put all our eggs in one basket. People were not eating eggs and not buying chickens anymore but we needed finances. We realised that if we had diversified into other areas of animal or crop production, we would have continued making a living and that is what effectively prompted us to go into rabbit farming.

So, how did you go about it?
Initially, we had been doing small scale rabbit farming for the more than 28 years that we have been doing poultry farming. We only went into fairly large-scale rabbit farming now and we are keeping close to 250 rabbits because we realised that we had a lot of by-products from poultry like the chicken droppings, the drugs that may not be necessary again for the chicken, the greenery which the chicken cannot eat again and the rabbits can still eat and convert into farm manure. There were other little things which would have been thrown away because chicken could not use but could be useful to rabbits.