#indoorranching — Public Fediverse posts

Doing more research on raising guinea pigs (cavy/cuy) indoors.

Apparently, a guinea pig herd consisting of two boars and twenty sows can sustain itself and provide meat for a family of six.

Food stock guinea pigs are bigger than the pet varieties but still perfect for indoors. They're smaller and more easily managed than rabbits.

They eat timothy hay & veggie scraps.

I think I'm going to do this.

#solarpunk #indoorRanching

So I've been looking at raising food animals indoors. Indoor ranching breaks the need to have land to produce meat.

In the same way that I've been looking at hydroponics to produce... produce... indoors as part of a decentralized food network, I also want to turn my attention towards meat production.

Quick aside: If you raise a well rounded enough vegetable product crop cycle, you can do well on a vegan diet and don't have to produce meat. I'm looking at that as well.

For meat production, I need animals that are:

• Small
• Can thrive in tighter environments (While we're raising food animals, their lives should be comfortable and humane).
• Ideally within a closed loop system where they can either feed or create waste that can be cycled back into other systems - eg grow the food hydroponically, use the scraps of produce to produce their own food, use their waste to feed hydroponic systems.

I've got a couple of ideas for animals:

• Fish: These feed nicely into aquaponic systems. Fish waste is high in nitrates which plants love.
• Quail: Not as large as chickens and quieter. While "dirty" (they fling their food around), systems can be utilized to minimize their dirtiness. Produce eggs, and meat. They can eat insects that can be raised off of veggie scraps. Can utilize LED full spectrum grow lights.
• Rabbits: Coneys are great. Survive nicely indoors, quiet, can eat a variety of things including certain veggie scraps directly.
• Cavie / Cuy: Guinea Pigs raised specifically for meat (this was their original reason for domestication). They can eat certain veggie scraps directly.

Things like Guinea Pigs and Fish already have a lot of material for growing them indoors. Those would need to be scaled out for food production.

#solarpunk #indoorRanching