Today I'm talking with Ruth at Rud Ridge LLC. You can also follow on Facebook.

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listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Ruth at Rud Ridge LLC in Wisconsin. Good morning, Ruth. How are you? Good morning. I'm fantastic. How are you? I'm good. Is the weather beautiful in Wisconsin today? Because it is gorgeous in Minnesota.

00:22
It's one of those Wisconsin days where you're not sure if 60 degrees is going to feel like 40 degrees or 60 degrees is going to feel like 80 degrees. So, uh, it's beautiful. I'll take it. Uh, but it's a little chilly out there for this time of year. Yeah. May has turned out to be more like April and April was more like May here. So I don't know. Mother nature is just a fickle. Which W I C H let's put it that way this year.

00:49
As long as my husband can get the corn in the ground today and the other crops planted, I will be very happy. Yes, yes, because corn needs time. So it can be knee high by the 4th of July, as they say. You've got it. They just planted the field that surrounds our property yesterday, day before yesterday, and they're doing soybeans this year. It's been corn for three years in a row. I'm so thankful it's soybeans this year.

01:17
little bit of change. Yeah, we actually had some ice on the duck ponds this morning, which was not normal for me. So, no, our outside um water supply, I don't know what they're called. It's the it would in the old days, it would have been the well where you had to pump the water out. And it's not you just lift the handle and it's like a spigot. Yeah, yeah, it's been frozen the last three mornings. And my husband's like,

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I'm going to have to fill up a five gallon pail of water and take it out to chickens. I'm like, good luck with that because that's heavy. So yeah, it's been weird, but I hear that this is the last cold week, supposedly until fall. We will see. Weather, man. I don't know. So tell me a little bit about yourself and what you guys do at Red Ridge LLC. So Red Ridge originally started with rabbits. em

02:13
Excuse me, specifically, Rex, not many rabbits. We started with rabbits because we lived in town on half an acre. ah children and I began with raising rabbits for meat and show. And we relocated to another property outside of town and have expanded into crop farming and we will be adding beef hopefully later this year. So we are all around a family homestead. My husband is a seventh.

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generation farmer here in Wisconsin. So we are looking to continue that with the eighth generation that would be our children. Nice. um I have a question about the Rex rabbit. Rex rabbits are the ones that look like velvet, right? Yes, they are. They um are kind of generally considered a commercial breed, larger in scale. They have a versatility where their their pelts are

03:11
utilized in a lot of garment making and such. very, very soft. Once you feel Rex rabbit fur, nothing else feels quite like it in density and softness. And they really are a joy to raise and watch thrive in our homestead. friend of mine had one and it was like

03:36
like a chocolatey, a light chocolate brown one, but she had black eyeliner around her eyes. And I fell in love with that rabbit. She was friendly and she was the softest animal I have ever petted in my whole life. Yes, absolutely. And we specifically have always focused on temperament of our stock. They are handled quite a bit from the day they are born. We do routine nest box checks. We're always hands on.

04:05
Um, you know, making sure that they're growing well, um, everybody's alive in the nest that they are used to being handled, that moms are used to us handling them. So it kind of really sets them up for, um, a thriving of their social personality in that aspect. But you know, you pointed out they can be really sweet and kind. Yes. I mean, I think that rabbits make excellent pets as long as you, as long as they are socialized to being handled. Yes. Well, and you know,

04:35
Certainly historically in America, rabbits have been utilized for meat. It's not quite as common as it once was um in either the country or our region specifically to have rabbits as meat. But I think it's an important point for people or families who want to be a little more self-sustainable, to be able to be involved in their own personal food chain, whether it be for themselves or for their pets. We do supply.

05:05
Some people rabbit meat for their pets, um dogs and cats, sometimes snakes. I think that people can care for their livestock and rabbits can be a part of livestock while also being kind of that cute and cuddly at the same time. It's an interesting dynamic to try to uh explain to people that are looking to begin on a homesteading journey.

05:34
Yes, you don't just have to have meat chickens, you can have meat rabbits as well. Yes. Rabbit meat actually is considered one of the healthiest and easily digestible proteins that's available to people to consume. um I know that, again, people have to kind of get past the fact that it's their own um animal they would be harvesting, and it's not presented in a package these days.

06:04
Every single animal that we consume kind of looks the same on a grocery store shelf. They're all basically in the same size packages. They're in the same sort of presentation. But rabbit meat from a health standpoint personally can really give people a solid boost into their nutrition. And I keep hearing that if all you ate was was rabbit for your meat source.

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that that doesn't go well because they don't have a lot of fat on them? So that is more geared to wild game rabbit. Okay. Um, while within the meat itself, there's not like a lot of marbling like you would see in, um, beef or in pork. Um, you will find when you harvest domestic rabbits that they do have a certain amount of fat content within them. Okay. That being said,

07:01
There's no one ever that's really consuming solely rabbit in their diet, you know in this day and age if you understand where I'm coming so it would be really really difficult to be so Exclusively relying upon rabbit meat that you would find yourself deficient, you know in in nutrient Okay, so it's

07:26
I wanted to bring it up because people keep telling me this and I'm like, I don't think anybody's just going to eat rabbit, number one. And number two, we had rabbits for a while and when we butchered them, they had fat on them. It's very much akin to um the old wives tale that if you touch a rabbit or you touch a nest from a rabbit that the mom will abandon that nest. It's kind of the same in the same vein that there may have been a

07:55
grain of truth into, you know, exclusively utilizing rabbit being poor for your health. You obviously need a well-rounded diet that somehow that translated into people believing that rabbit starvation is an issue when you're utilizing rabbit meat and that it's just not the case. you. That's I was hoping you would clear that up for me. Absolutely. And you know far more about rabbits than I do. We did it. We did not.

08:25
do well at it and we don't raise rabbits anymore. I'm sorry to hear that because we really define them to be a positive impact in our life. We had dumb bunnies. They did not know how to procreate and we had the right genders or sexes or whatever. They just didn't make babies. I believe people have found that there is the saying of, you know, breeding like rabbits that particularly when you want them to, they may not.

08:54
uh It can be a little bit of an art and a science. uh There are things such as the rabbit's over consumption of a pelleted feed that can lead them to be a little heavier in fat that would limit their ability to get pregnant. There can be other environmental stressors or factors that can make it a little more difficult than it may seem on the surface to kind...