27 Raising Your Own Meat in Your Backyard | Rabbits, Ducks & Small-Scale Meat Production for Beginners

Is it really possible to raise your own meat in a backyard—without a lot of land or a big investment?

In this episode of Handmade Happiness, Jessica and Thomas Clark from The Lark Life share what it looks like to raise meat rabbits and ducks on a small homestead. Through real stories and everyday experiences, they talk about how raising your own meat can be simple, affordable, and deeply rewarding.

This isn’t about building a large-scale farm. It’s about starting small, learning as you go, and becoming more connected to your food and the rhythms of your home.

Find more resources, courses, and practical guides at TheLarkLife.com

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to Handmade Happiness, a podcast about simple living, handmade skills, and building a life rooted in what matters most. We talk about everything from homesteading and cooking from scratch to quilting, gardening, and raising capable kids. This is a place to slow down, learn new skills, and be reminded that a meaningful life is often built in the small everyday moments. If you enjoy today's conversation, you can follow or subscribe to the podcast wherever you're listening. That way, new episodes will just be there when you're ready for them. Now for today's episode. Hi there and welcome to the Handmade Happiness Podcast. My name is Jessica.

SPEAKER_00 0:39

And I'm Thomas.

SPEAKER_01 0:40

And welcome in for our conversation this week. So we had something pretty exciting happen around here this week. Um last summer, we purchased some ducks, some little baby ducklings, and we rowing ducks to be specific. Raised those ducks, and we um ended up processing a lot of them in the fall for meat. Um, but we kept a handful of them. So we have one male and three females. Um, and they started laying eggs back at the beginning of the year. Yeah. Um, and just recently our one of our laying hens, one of our chickens, decided mother to just take over that nest of duck eggs that was out in the barn. And so we happily let that broody hen sit on those eggs. And so she's hatched out seven of those ducklings this week.

SPEAKER_00 1:40

And we've got more in the more in the dub.

SPEAKER_01 1:42

And we've got more in the incubator.

SPEAKER_00 1:43

She decided she was done sitting on a nest, and so we took the other ones home.

SPEAKER_01 1:47

We're grateful for the seven that she hatched out, but, anyways, um when those ducklings, as they hatched out, it was such an exciting thing for me because I was like, Yes.

SPEAKER_00 2:01

Free ducks.

SPEAKER_01 2:02

Like free, yeah, I didn't have to pay money for these ducks. Now, yes, we've been feeding the ducks that are laying these eggs, but that's very minimal compared to what I would have paid to purchase seven baby ducklings from the hatchery.

SPEAKER_00 2:17

Um well, and they're they're free-ranging too, so like they're eating, they're wandering around in the yard eating uh bugs and the feed bill is very minimal. So it's minimal feed that they're getting, it's supplementary.

SPEAKER_01 2:28

Um, and so anyway, so it was so exciting for me. So I was like, let's have a conversation today on the podcast, just about some animals that you can easily raise to have your own meat um at home and like to have that meat reproducing itself at home so that you're not constantly having to repurchase things. Like, like the ideal thing would be that you just have this sustainable supply of meat right out in your backyard.

SPEAKER_00 2:59

Yeah, that's the goal, right?

SPEAKER_01 3:01

Yeah, so let's let's get into that conversation today. Because again, it was a super exciting moment. It was one of those moments that I was like, yes, so like we're we're doing it, it's it's happening and and honestly happening with very little effort on our part.

SPEAKER_00 3:14

Well, and it really wasn't even intentional. Like, I I that's always been the direction that we wanted to go, but we didn't set about to like create this situation where we would have baby ducks. It just we realized, oh, there's a nest full of duck eggs and the chicken's brooding is sitting on them, so let's see what happens. Yeah, and so it worked, and here we are with $70 worth of free ducks in in a box. So ducks are ducks are interesting it to me because the first couple of days they're so cute and they're awkward and clumsy at their big webbed feet, and then after like four days, they're terrorists.

SPEAKER_01 3:47

Like their their box is a as soon as they find the water and figure out that the water is fun, um, it's game over. The bedding is always trashed, it's the water is always half empty.

SPEAKER_00 4:00

Our ducks manage to somehow back pollute their waterer.

SPEAKER_01 4:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:04

So the water in the jar, if you're familiar with waterers, it's supposed to water comes down and it goes out in the little tray and they dabble in it, right? And they manage to somehow back pollute the entire jar of water with food.

SPEAKER_01 4:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:15

Um, because that's just how ducks are.

SPEAKER_01 4:17

Yeah. They're dabblers, and so they dabble right there in that little waterer.

SPEAKER_00 4:22

It's like your kid with a water bottle, you know, you give them the water bottle, they take the lid off, and then they go and like you smell. And you end up with chunks but worse.

SPEAKER_01 4:30

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Only their chunks smell a lot worse, though.

SPEAKER_00 4:33

Yeah, that's true. That's very true. Um, one of the things, one of the ones that I think has been the easiest for us is uh rabbits. Yes. We raised rabbits before when we lived in Mississippi, yeah. And they they breed readily, yes, they breed frequently. So where a lot of the animal industry is kind of like unethically breeding their animals, like just repeatedly um turning their mother animals into baby factories, rabbits do that inherently. That's just life for them, right?

SPEAKER_01 5:04

And the turnaround, like she'll have a litter in a month's time, and then you give her about a month with those babies that she's that she's raising, and she's only nursing them for a little while. Before that month is over, they're already eating the whatever feed and other things that you're you're giving.

SPEAKER_00 5:27

Well, and the meat is so they're easy to process. They're if you've never processed a rabbit, um you basically make four or five cuts and pull. And like I'm not trying to be gross, but it's very easy to process rabbits.

SPEAKER_01 5:40

Right. The hide off of the rabbit and have a cleaned rabbit is much simpler than having to plug feathers off of a chicken or a duck. Right.

SPEAKER_00 5:49

Right, you're skinning the rabbit, whereas with chickens and ducks, you're plucking, you're keeping skin on, and it's a lot harder. But the rabbits are they taste great, the very neutral tasting meat, it's not funky or gamey. They're easy to process. Well, in real life, getting what, seven or eight rabbits at a time per litter at least.

SPEAKER_01 6:07

Yeah, and any of the recipes that you would be using chicken potatoes. Oh, you can substitute rabbit rabbit for.

SPEAKER_00 6:12

You won't know. If you substitute rabbit in chicken pot pie, chicken noodle soup, anything with chicken. I say you won't know. Most people won't know. I I don't notice a difference.

SPEAKER_01 6:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:22

So, and it's they're super easy. I mean, we our our rabbits live in big bougie cages that are what, two feet by three feet each, and that's bigger than they really need. In a 12 square foot area, you could have two breeding females and a male, and they're making babies, and you put the babies in another cage, they can all kind of be together. I mean, it does not take any space at all to raise rabbits from.

SPEAKER_01 6:47

It could be kept in a sheltered corner of your backyard, your back porch. Like even if you don't have space, it's something that you could easily do to have a source of clean homegrown meat.

SPEAKER_00 7:01

If you had a way to divide it up, a big dog kennel could raise three or four rabbits. Yeah. That's if you wanted to keep them separate, right?

SPEAKER_01 7:09

Yeah. Um the other thing is it's very inexpensive to get all of that started. So that's true. Two rabbits is not. You can build a space for them very inexpensively, and then you can find the rabbits very inexpensively. People are constantly selling. You might even find somebody giving away some meat rabbits.

SPEAKER_00 7:29

Yeah. Um traffic supply, some of your local like farm uh supply places, feed stores, a lot of times they do co-ops or like swap meets where you can take somebody and like, hey, I've got these this rooster that I'm wanting to trade, and somebody will swap you a rabbit for it, or you know, or you can find somebody selling them for twenty or thirty dollars.

SPEAKER_01 7:48

Not not a lot.

SPEAKER_00 7:50

Um they do they do that. What's it called? Interspecies vigor, where if you have two different rabbits of two different breeds and you breed them together, the babies grow really fast and they end up coming out pretty big.

SPEAKER_01 8:01

That first generation.

SPEAKER_00 8:02

The first generation. It doesn't repeat through like the generations, but um again, all the bonuses, right?

SPEAKER_01 8:08

You get big babies that grow fast and taste good, and it's inexpensive, and unlike other large livestock, so other livestock is first of all, it's much more expensive than that. They're hard to manage, they're expensive to purchase. You have to have much more infrastructure as far as fencing and shelter and all kinds of those things. Feeding them is more expensive. Yeah. And then a lot of them come with expensive vet bills if you're inexperienced and they have some sort of trouble giving birth. You're gonna, you know, it's gonna be.

SPEAKER_00 8:42

Well, depending on where you are, it can even be hard to find a large animal vet.

SPEAKER_01 8:45

Yeah, to come and even animals.

SPEAKER_00 8:48

The other the other thing we haven't mentioned about rabbits, rabbit poop is maybe the best soil we have ever seen in our lives. We had a pile in Mississippi and that's where we threw the rabbit poop, and there's hay, you know, so it's a compost pile, right? But that dirt, I have never seen dirt that black, that rich, and it's just it's like black gold. I mean, it's unbelievable.

SPEAKER_01 9:12

Beautiful compost.

SPEAKER_00 9:13

Um, now it's hot, right? You gotta let it, you it takes high nitrogen and stuff, you gotta let it cool off a little bit, but uh because of the urine and stuff.

SPEAKER_01 9:20

Their pellets that honestly, the the feces is not bad. What you have to worry about is the urine. So you have to give that time and again the ammonia and stuff. So, like for our setup, we have our male and our female in two separate cages side by side, and we purposely built it so that there's bins underneath where they are that catch mortar mixing trays, pro tip. It catches all of the loose hay that falls out of their cages that they don't eat.

SPEAKER_00 9:47

It literally is a bucket of compost.

SPEAKER_01 9:48

It catches all of their feces, all of their urine, dropped food, so that um one, that hay kind of absorbs some of that urine. So you don't have the smell that you would think that you would have um that we had in the past when we weren't collecting it this way. Then when it gets full, we just take it and dump it in our compost pile and give it some time. And I mean, the microbes are going nuts, all the things are doing what they're doing, and it's helping break down the rest of the things that we're adding into that compost compost pile, and you go and scoop some of that out, and it is the best thing for the car.

SPEAKER_00 10:26

I don't I don't know why it is, but like because we've used other animals, right? Manure and even chicken poop is great and all those other things. But something about rabbit poop, it that dirt is better than the best. Like, if you go and buy a bag of topsoil at the store, it's not gonna be that good, right? The rabbit, well, I mean, it's not good anyway because it's dead, but I'm talking about the quality of the dirt, and you just the what you hold in your hand, it's unbelievable. Yeah, collateral benefits.

SPEAKER_01 10:51

Yes. So, excellent source for meat, excellent source for compost, super easy to get started, super easy to maintain. Um and we handle ours daily, and we got the ones that we have currently, the people that we got them from, they made it a point to handle their bunnies like every single day from the day they were born. So they're not skittish like other rats. They don't run away and jump. Like you go out to feed them and they come to the cage, they're like looking for you to pet them and talk to them and touch them.

SPEAKER_00 11:24

Um makes them super easy to handle.

SPEAKER_01 11:26

So they're very easy to handle.

SPEAKER_00 11:28

Um, they're easy to transport.

SPEAKER_01 11:30

And again, you don't really have any there's there's not really any major issues to worry about, no major expenses. It's just this beautiful source of meat and compost for your home right there in your backyard.

SPEAKER_00 11:44

Yep. So and it's easy because they're cheap, right? It's easy to change your genetics, right?

SPEAKER_01 11:50

So if you decide you want to keep part of a litter, swap your mail with somebody else's mail and have all new genetics brought in so that you keep really healthy.

SPEAKER_00 11:58

And again, the swap meat, you might just trade your mail for someone else's mail so that you're freshening up your genetics. Everybody because other people are looking for that as well. So um, what else? We've we've we've talked about chickens.

SPEAKER_01 12:10

So, yeah, we've talked about chickens. So we didn't talk a whole lot about our ducks. So I I have learned a few things. So when our ducks started laying eggs, and we purposely kept a male, hoping that at some point in the spring or summer we had fertilized eggs. Try to hatch out some ducks ourselves. Um, we didn't plan on it happening this quickly and this easily all by itself. We were that was a nice little thing, but as I was researching and looking at things, um, I did discover, and part of why I went ahead and got the incubator was our chicken did a great job staying on that nest and hatching out all of those eggs. And the eggs hatched out over several days, and she stayed with us. And we were taking those ducklings from her just because it's cold outside, the weather's unpredictable. I wasn't sure how she would do with the ducklings. I brought them in and put them in a brooder so that I could be monitoring monitoring them a little bit more carefully. But she was a champ and she stayed out there. But what I've found out about ducks is even if you have a mama duck that's sitting on a nest, that gestation period for a duck is 28 days, where a chicken is like 21 days, um, 28 days, and you might have that duck sit there for a week and then just decide, eh, I'm over it, and go on and move to something else. They don't they don't nest the same way that the chickens do, where that that chicken is gonna be broody, even if she doesn't have any eggs under her. If you're taking her eggs every day, um, she will be broody for weeks. Um that just has the ducks kind of don't do that, so it was really fortunate that we did have the hen that wanted to sit on them. Yeah. And again, now we have some more eggs that we've pulled um since we're on this duckling thing that we've put in an incubator and we'll see.

SPEAKER_00 14:11

Which reminds me, I owe you some nest boxes.

SPEAKER_01 14:14

Yeah, I took care of it myself.

SPEAKER_00 14:16

Did you? I'll have to go check that out. I was supposed to build nest boxes onto this chicken coop that I bought, and the chicken coop, that's another episode, but um I did not get the nest boxes built that day, weekend, whatever it was. Um, but my resourceful wife has remedied the situation. She's good at that.

SPEAKER_01 14:37

So um, yeah, so that's one thing. If you are considering ducks, uh really poultry of any kind. I know some people that do have ducks and chickens and birds born on their property. Um have some success if there's a broody hen or something, but a lot of them are pulling in those fertilized eggs and putting them in an incubator just because it's an incubator's not anywhere, it's not that expensive. It's not that expensive, it's more controlled. There's less variables, less things that can go wrong out out in the predators um that you're not aware of. Like, I'm not watching the hen 24 hours a day to see that she's doing the job that she's supposed to be doing and keeping them warm. Um so she could be off of them for a whole day before I really even notice that something was up. So it just That is one thing where the rabbits, it's like you said it and forget it, you don't even really think about it, it just happens.

SPEAKER_00 15:41

Um, with the birds, put them together for 30 seconds and birds.

SPEAKER_01 15:44

You have to pay a little more attention. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:46

Um, funny story about birds. We have these two turkeys, and one is a male, and he's very proud of that fact.

SPEAKER_01 15:54

He is 24 hours a day, he is. So you can go to our Instagram and or our Facebook. I've posted pictures and videos of we have royal palm turkeys and heritage week. They're beautiful birds. Um, but yeah, he's yeah, he's really proud of himself.

SPEAKER_00 16:11

He is, and I think his girlfriend. I don't know that she's interested, right? Well, so the other day, um she's because she's just now getting to the age where she would be interested in him.

SPEAKER_01 16:24

She's not laying eggs, and turkeys are are a little different than uh say a chicken is gonna lay an egg, you know, all the time.

SPEAKER_00 16:33

Yeah, their gestation's a little different.

SPEAKER_01 16:34

Turkeys have like a set window based on the weather, like in the springtime, summertime. So these turkeys now are old enough. She's old enough to be laying eggs.

SPEAKER_00 16:46

They're sexually mature, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:47

But because it's still been cool, she hasn't started laying eggs yet, but it's getting close. I know with summer coming, we'll start to have some turkey eggs being laid.

SPEAKER_00 16:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:58

Um, but yeah, so the other day we went on a walk around our property to check out the garden, to check out some of the other animals.

SPEAKER_00 17:05

Yeah, so and so we walked back there in the corner where the turkeys were, and we noticed that um she had actually laid down for him, right? She had had snuggled down and was kind of looking at him like, hey, you're gonna do your thing back there, big boy. And so he proceeds to climb on her back with both feet and stand there like he's king of the mountain.

unknown 17:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:29

And he's like flapping his wings, he's like, I did the thing, look at me, and and that was all he ever did. Uh he didn't do a thing. And she sat there patiently waiting for him to do his thing, and he didn't do anything except be proud of the fact that he was now six inches higher off the ground than he normally was. Yeah, and and that was it. And then he got off and was just like walked away, like, look at me and my bad self. And um, I think she was not impressed, uh, nor were we, but it was funny.

SPEAKER_01 17:57

So yeah, we'll we'll have to see. We'll we'll keep you updated on any developments if we end up, you know. I would love so we have kept this male and female pair around in hopes that we can have some baby turkeys.

SPEAKER_00 18:13

Because turkeys are expensive.

SPEAKER_01 18:15

Um, so hopefully he figures it out.

SPEAKER_00 18:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:18

Because right now it's not looking so good.

SPEAKER_00 18:20

He didn't get it. So we haven't really talked about large animals, uh like say pigs, goats, sheep, cows, which are all animals that we hope to raise in the future for meat.

unknown 18:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:35

Um, but the the point is that if you don't have let's say you don't have space, right? You can raise chickens.

SPEAKER_01 18:42

Or money.

SPEAKER_00 18:42

Or rabbits. If you have a garage, if you have a basement, if you have a backyard, if you have a corner of your bedroom that you don't mind being a little smelly, you can raise rabbits, right? Um, but the point is that you can do all these animals that are self-perpetuating because animals do what animals do. And you can raise we raise all of our animals for food. They're not pets. Yeah. Um, and what we do is we raise those animals and we want them to perpetuate because we're slaughtering them to eat. But I know a lot of people it weirds them out to raise animals for meat because they're like, oh, but I can't kill it, it's my Well, because I mean you do kind of get attached to them because you're caring for them for months. Well, sure, and you're investing care of these animals. But like for us, if you take a take a chicken for example, an industrially raised chicken basically lives a life of horrors until it is mechanically slaughtered, injected with salt water, bleached for sanitation, and put into a package at your local big box store. That's not the food that we envision for our family. Right? Right. Now I'm not saying we don't ever buy meat at the store, but my point is that the chickens that live on our cow.

SPEAKER_01 19:57

Because we do, oh, yeah, because we don't have a cow yet, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:00

But the chickens that live on our farm live a life of luxury. They have fresh water all the time, they have good food all the time, they have all the bugs and grass and dandelions and whatever it is they want to eat out of our yard that they can eat. They're not harassed by predators, they live a fantastic life. They're literally being petted.

SPEAKER_01 20:22

Oh, yeah, with people checking on them and picking them up that we butcher them. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:26

And when we do that, it's done ethically. They're we put their meat to good use. So they they literally live a life that is unimaginable for most chickens that are raised on this planet. And there are billions of chickens raised. Like, it's it's an insane amount. I forget to tell you.

SPEAKER_01 20:43

I've heard some people talk about it as like the one bad day.

SPEAKER_00 20:46

Like it their life is bliss perfectly until they go in the cone.

SPEAKER_01 20:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:51

And they're like, hey, what's this? And then and then they're done.

SPEAKER_01 20:53

And so But then they need to feed our family.

SPEAKER_00 20:57

Yeah, and and they are they are having a better life than virtually every other chicken in the world will ever have, right? And so it's the same with the rabbits, and it's the same with the large animals, right? They live a life of peace and ease and comfort and happiness. And uh, I think Joel Salatin talks about them, you know, their their chicken-y essence, right? They're just doing doing what chickens do up until the time that they're harvested for our use.

SPEAKER_01 21:20

Well, and what's been interesting to me is so we as a society have gotten very disconnected from our food.

SPEAKER_00 21:28

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:29

So, for a lot of us who have never grown up around animals and processing your own animals for food, um, it seems weird. And it can be hard. But I think about our kids. Um, our six year old son was just a part of the processing day we had for our ducks and our chickens. And he came in and we're cooking dinner, and he's asking some. Specifically, if we're eating this one particular chicken by name, yeah, um, which is a chicken he loved, but he also was like, But this this chicken is now delicious food for my belly.

SPEAKER_00 22:13

And there's like this appreciation, I guess, of like, yeah, that that was my chicken, and now this chicken is feeding me and giving me good food, and well, and we're doing it in an ethical manner, we're doing it in a way that's good for the environment, it's good for us, it's good for the animals. It's win-win-win, right? And the thing is, like, every time you eat chicken nuggets, some chicken somewhere lived in a one square foot cage for the 12 weeks of its miserable life until it got thrown in an industrial meat processor. Like, something had to die for you to eat chicken nuggets. Every time you eat a steak, that was a cow that was probably raised on grain, which is not what cows normally eat, by the way, and we'll get in that's another episode. But that cow was most likely was not raised in an environment where he was just happily eating grass his whole life out on a pasture somewhere, and then one day, you know, pop and he was done. Most likely he was herded into a pen and was terrified, along with a bunch of other cows, and was dipped and dunked and all these other things. And I mean, there's plenty of videos out there, like it don't go down the YouTube rabbit hole because it's a dark place, right? But the point is that the meat industry is not exactly known for its ethical behaviors. You're welcome to come look at my animals anytime you know they're happy as can be. The ducks are splashing around in their little kitty pool, the chickens are just scratching through the compost because they don't have internet, right? And uh everybody's happy.

SPEAKER_01 23:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:53

And that's that's the goal, right? That's the goal. And it's clean and it's grass-fed and good nutrition for our family.

SPEAKER_01 24:04

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:04

Yeah, and the nutrition, and we don't have numbers because we've not had our food tested, right? Our our animals, but um, there are several people on online that you can go to and they talk about the nutrition numbers from animals that are raised naturally on grass pastures and uh raised ethically as opposed to the nutrition from the product that you're getting from industrial or what they call big ag, right? It's off the charts. What did Joel say? I think their their eggs were like 30 times the amount of selenium and things like that that that uh the FDA standard sets for an egg. But when that egg is laid by a chicken that's fed the bare minimum that it needs to lay eggs its whole life. Of course, it's large.

SPEAKER_01 24:48

Versus art that get to be in the sunshine and roam the grass and choose the bugs and the plants and the things that they're eating.

SPEAKER_00 24:55

And it's a visible difference. Like with eggs, is that's the easiest thing to tell the difference. It's it's night and day difference.

SPEAKER_01 25:00

A very rich dark orange yolk versus yolk.

SPEAKER_00 25:04

Yeah, we do, we do versus regular pale eggs. So yeah. Um we've we haven't talked, we we've talked briefly about bees. Bees are another self-sustaining animal, right? This they breed, they they they keep themselves going. You never run out of bees unless you screw up, which does happen sometimes. Don't feel bad. That reminds me, I still need to be able to do bee traps. You do.

SPEAKER_01 25:30

It's about that time. Uh, we'll talk about bees next week. Um, but yeah, so it it was just one of those. This week has been one of those kind of full circle, like here we are, we have these animals that we've been caring for, and now we have this whole new generation of animals that's gonna continue to feed us, and it didn't cost us anything. Yeah, uh, it really didn't require anything extra work-wise from us. We just cared for what we had, let it do what it does, and now we have more of it, and it's fabulous, it's really exciting.

SPEAKER_00 26:09

And like we said, eventually we plan to do that with larger animals, right? I don't know that our setup is sufficient to do like beef, to self-perpetuate beef, because with some of the larger animals, you start talking about having to bring in uh a stud or a bull, like with cows. We don't want to have a bull on our five-acre property, it's just not smart. We have to bring one in, or we have to take our cow to it, which means now we have to transport that cow or get an AI tech. Or get an AI tech to come in, and right, so the logistics of that get a lot bigger. One of these days, when we have more space, we may do that. I don't know why we wouldn't, right?

SPEAKER_01 26:45

But um sheep we could potentially have a ram.

SPEAKER_00 26:49

Yeah, or like pigs, yeah, pigs.

SPEAKER_01 26:52

We could potentially do that with pigs.

SPEAKER_00 26:53

Um, so it again it it just depends on your situation. But if if you're in an apartment in New York City and you have a back porch, start with rabbits. Like start with rabbits, and they can perpetuate themselves, and you'll buy the first two, and away you go. Yeah, and there's something really, really magical about that process happening. And like you said, sitting down to dinner and you're eating a chicken that came from a chicken that right that it's like I didn't pay for this. I this was free to meet because I gave it grass.

SPEAKER_01 27:28

When it was an egg, and then one day it was this cute little duckling or chick, and now you've watched it and cared for it, and it's grown, and it's big enough to be the meal on your dinner table.

SPEAKER_00 27:38

And you didn't buy it, and you didn't buy it. No, that's the that's the thing, is you didn't buy it. Yeah, it's amazing.

SPEAKER_01 27:44

It is amazing.

SPEAKER_00 27:45

Highly recommend it. Yes, so so get some bunnies or some chickens, and if it weirds you out, call me, you can fly me out, I'll slaughter them for you. Nominal fee. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:58

Yeah, we have some some other videos on our channel showing us processing our chickens and our ducks. Um, when we have this round of bunnies and they're ready to be processed, we'll share that. So you can just kind of keep an eye on our channel for that. Um, and I think that's I think that's all we have for tonight.

SPEAKER_00 28:15

I think that's it for me. We're gonna go watch a movie with the kids.

SPEAKER_01 28:18

Yeah. Thank you for thank you for joining us and tuning in for another week, and we look forward to seeing you next time. If you're wanting to go a little deeper and actually learn some of these skills step by step, I do have courses and workshops available at thelarklife.com. They're designed to be simple, practical, and approachable, especially if you're just getting started. You can also join our email list where we share guides, printables, and updates on what we're working on here. It's a quieter space and one of our favorite ways to stay connected with you. I'll put a link to both in the show notes. Thank you for choosing to spend some of your time with us. If you've been enjoying the podcast, one of the simplest ways to support us is by telling a friend and leaving a review wherever you're listening. It helps more people find these conversations, and it truly means a lot for us to hear how our stories are impacting you. You can also go to thelarklife.comslash podcast. There you'll find an option to give a small one time or ongoing gift, and it helps support the time, tools, and energy that go into creating these episodes. Until next time.