Prepare yourself for a minute of dry reading to start off. It gets better after all the numbers though, I promise.
So with the rabbits we picked up last month, I've been thinking on a lot of different systems that I can develop with them. Well, not develop, God already developed them. Maybe I can harness them. Being a tree guy, I'm leaning heavily toward an orchard setup. Here's my idea:
Integrated rabbits and peach orchard
In some looking around on another project, back when I registered Foxfire Orchards, I looked at high density orchard planting options. I came across a study using dwarf peach trees at radically dense plant spacing. They were talking about industrial type production that's probably very extractive from the ecosystem, but it got my wheels turning for a regenerative integrated system.
The figures for that table come out to 86.6sf (8.05m²), 43.5sf (4.04m²), 28.6sf (2.66m²), 21.6sf (2m²),
and 14.4sf (1.33m²) per tree, respectively. Those yields come out to roughly 20 pounds, 30 pounds, 29 pounds, 25 pounds, and 14 pounds per tree (roughly 9, 14, 13, 11, and 6 kilograms respectively).
My idea is to do a dense planting of 64 square feet (5.95m²) per tree (680 trees per acre), having the trees planted on an eight foot grid. I'd like a planting of a two foot radius of comfrey around each tree, allowing for four foot rows. The rows would be sowed with diverse perennial and self seeding annual forage as ground cover over which would run two 4x4 foot rabbit tractors. One tractor would be divided in two,providing a generous space for two rabbits, the other would be set up with a nest box to accommodate a mother and her brood. The comfrey would be a living mulch to keep the ground cover excluded around the trees, as well as a chop and drop and fodder source.
Using the math in that chart, it looks like that'd put out about 5-9 tons of peaches per acre. Dwarf trees fruit early, reaching mature production level in about three years. The trees, grafted onto dwarfing rootstock, grow 5-6 feet tall (just under 2m), so they require less space and less specialized equipment to harvest their yield. I think a yield of 300 pounds (~140kg) a season is reasonable from the sixteen tree base model.
This would mimic a natural system I've observed. I don't know about where y'all are, but here in Texas there's wild plum thickets in damn near every pasture. All kinds of critters live in em, and they're too thick for any big critters to get in efficiently. They're a good place for rabbits and birds to hide and nest. Plums and peaches are both stone fruits, and I'd be harnessing the power of the rabbits to make a similar system to the one that God is already running. Those thickets are in pastures usually, and there's almost always bigger trees growing out of them. Succession works like that. So those thickets of plums provide shelter for oaks or pecans or other larger trees that are farther along in the forest succession. So under a few of the peach trees, I'd plant a couple mulberry, redbud, or pecan trees to take over the succession. I've got plenty of oaks here, and a nice clearing already in mind for this project. I wanted to put it up here as an idea and see if anyone had heard, thought of, or tried anything similar. It's a really super high intensive system, which isn't really my thing if it's not set up right, so I'm unsure yet if I'll actually do it. Orcharding sounds fun though, and I love trees. The rabbits of course would be my scaled down version of a cow; herbivores producing meat and a premium soil amendment through their digestive processing.
Cute runny babbit pic to break up the dry talk about production and other boring stuff.
I wanted to bounce this idea around in public and see what's out there. Any feedback from anyone? Sharing would be appreciated, as I'd like to cast a wide net and get a lot of input. Y'all know me; the more minds I can gather information from, the better.
Let me know what youve got
Love from Texas
Nate 💚