Today we’d like to introduce you to Chris LaRocque.
Hi Chris, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
When I first started, there was no thought of this becoming a business, just more a backyard family farm. We simply wanted to eat healthier and grow more of our own food naturally. Chickens were an easy sell to my wife and quail weren’t too much of a jump, but I definitely fetched some odd looks when I suggested meat rabbits. With all the research I did into being self-sustaining, there were quite a bit of homesteading forums that emphasized raising meat rabbits as a solid choice. I started researching the nutritional makeup and subsequently the commercial rabbit industry as a whole. As it turns out, rabbit meat is an extremely healthy and sustainably produced protein that is common outside of the US. As we culturally shift to a more health-conscious mindset, Americans are becoming more open-minded and the market for alternative proteins is beginning to expand. In particular, many of the local eateries that champion “locally sourced” and “farm-to-table” as an ethos are necessarily flexible and often rotate their menus seasonably or even more often to accomodate the availability of their ingredients. Once my chefs saw me as a consistent and reliable source of a fresh and local protein, I developed a loyal following. As word spread in the cullinary groups through Austin, my rabbits have become a commodity that has forced me to discontinue most of the other agricultural products that we started with. Our sales have increased every year and last year we delivered more than 4,000 pounds of meat to our community!
As a more recent development, one of my customers featured a rabbit dish only requiring the hind legs, so I went through hundreds of rabbits only delivering that section of meat. I didn’t want to waste the rest of the rabbit, so I developed a freeze dried pet food with the other cuts of meat and sent it to the lab for general analysis. Once again, the business has evolved to add freeze dried pet food as a product.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
I have to laugh at the idea of it being a smooth road. I would say because this was never intended to be a business and it just kind of evolved into one, there were many challenges from unplanned pivots due to unantipated demands and an expedited effort to scale everything up. Having a tiny operation that is successful doesn’t scale up without bringing in a littany of other challenges that weren’t there before. For instance you can make a few hundred pounds of meat in a year with a dozen rabbits. If you’re making thousands of pounds and you’ve got hundreds of rabbits, now you’ve got a waste management challenge that simply wasn’t a thing before. Instead of buying a bag of feed every week, I’m buying a pallet. If you bring in a rabbit from another farm and it has an illness, that can sometimes spread and wipe out your entire herd. More rabbits means more feeding, breeding, cage cleaning, etc. More customers means more orders, more weighing rabbits, processing them, packaging them, and ultimately deliverying them. So far we’ve managed to keep everything in-house, but growing any bigger will simply require more hands to keep up.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
What do I do for work? Yes. haha I’m literally answering this question from a hotel room in Paraguay because I’m here on military orders for my career as a reservist…so there’s that entire piece of my life. But then I’ll fly home and shed the uniform for business casual so I can punch in Monday with my other career as a Senior Project Manager for the University of Texas at Austin. I’m a licensed engineer and I’ve been managing commercial construction for more than 20 years, so that’s how I get the bills paid. Squeeze in this family business that soaks up time and some hobbies and some being a husband and a dad and then whatever projects I can knock out, most of my minutes are accounted for. I think the activity I participate the least in is probably sleep. My wife will tell you that I’m always working on a few projects in between all that and I’ve found that relaxing isn’t really a thing I’m good at. I love the idea of it and I constantly say I want to get there, but when the opportunity presents itself I can never really sit still long enough for it to settle in.
What am I most proud of? My wife, definitely. She’s my favorite person and I am so proud when people find out she’s married to me. She’s given me two amazing boys that have really provided a level of joy we wouldn’t otherwise know and it’s made us a family that is always full of love.
Do you have any memories from childhood that you can share with us?
When I was a kid, my parents took us to Lake Georgetown what seemed like every weekend throughout the summers and we’d take up 3 or 4 campsites with my aunts and uncles and cousins. We’d hike down to swim in the lake, we’d set up a volleyball net in the grass, we’d feed the deer by hand (we’ve reached the statute of limitations on that), we’d go fishing, and we’d just make a ton of memories as a family.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.rustic-rabbit.com/
- Instagram: rusticrabbittx
- Youtube: @rusticrabbit2502
