Three Little Ladies Rabbitry Blog

When we first started out raising rabbits, there was never much deliberation from us about the cost or the possibility of actually making money. In fact, our main concern was giving our children a project that would assist us in teaching them character and responsibility.

However, I quickly learned how expensive this project could be in the beginning. First, there was the purchase of cages. In fact as we looked at our barn over the past few weeks, I’d actually like a different setup. That would involve more cages. But cages are expensive, so that may be put on hold for a while.

Of course having little space it was necessary to build a barn. I saved a lot of money by buying blue prints, and building the barn myself, including fabricating my own trusses. Although the barn is complete, I still would like to consider electricity in the barn rather than 50′ extension cords! An automatic watering system would also be nice.

This year we have made no large equipment purchases, so I thought it  would now be a good time to take a look at how we have done overall. We have basically broke even on the business.

The website pays for itself. I have GoogleAds on the site, and the money I make from that actually pays the cost of the website hosting. There actually is a little income involved in that but not much.

The highest cost is feed, but is is in close competition with travel expenses for shows. In fact if I were to remove the expense of the shows, and even remove the sales of rabbits at the shows, we would have made money this year.

Obviously, we can’t remove the feed cost. The rabbits have to eat! The question is, could we remove the show expenses? I’ve actually pondered this question to a large extent. Over the past few months we have traveled to more shows than at any time in our brief history.

What needs to be looked at is supply and demand. Supply for us is an issue right now, We have nearly nothing to sell. We have babies in the boxes, so hopefully that will change soon. The other problem is demand for our product. Right now that demand is good. But what happens if you don’t show your rabbits?

If we don’t show, how could we prove the value of your rabbits? Why do breeders want certain lines of rabbits? I can tell you its not because they have the best website. Its because their rabbits do well at the show table. Which has brought me to this conclusion, attending shows may be costing your rabbitry plenty of profits, but you would have those profits if you weren’t attending shows. Its really a catch 22. So we’ll keep selling our rabbits, we’ll keep attending shows, and although we aren’t losing money, hopefully we’ll start making money by doing some other small things to make that happen.

I have several ideas that could help make TLL a little more profitable. I’ll share those in the future.

Rob
Three Little Ladies Rabbitry