I second raising quail. They don't require a lot of room at all, begin laying fertile eggs at six weeks old and can be butchered at around the same time or after their egg production wanes.
You want the jumbo Cotournix quail - don't bother with the standard Cotournix. Eggs are pretty cheap to get since these guys lay like crazy. I've seen 100+ eggs on
ebay go for $10-15 plus $10-15 in shipping. They take 16-18 days to hatch out in an incubator and can be sexed by chest color at a couple weeks old.
If you're on a budget, here are your cost to get into quail:
Standard Little Giant Incubator: $35
Egg Turner: $35 (unnecessary if you want to hand turn them.)
Forced Air Fan: $20 (Needs to be installed. Not required, but will improve hatch)
Quail cups for the eggs: $10
Meat/Gamebird Feed: $12
Quail Eggs: $25
You can build your own incubator for far, far less. I don't recommend a used one since styrofoam incubators tend to have a lower hatch rate over time due to improper cleaning and all that jazz. The incubator will hold 120 quail eggs in the egg cups at a single time. This means that you can hatch out around 100 quail every three weeks.
Quail eggs can be eaten just like chicken eggs. You can freeze the eggs when you have too many (crack them open into ice cube trays with X number of eggs in each so you can use them for cooking later if you want), pickle them or sell them online. If you want to get additional money for the eggs then blow out the contents, clean/dry the shells and sell them for crafts on
ebay. That way you have eggs to eat and don't have to throw anything away.
Quail meat tastes a lot like chicken and is more nutritious. I don't remember how much meat you'll get off of each quail. As adults they are around a pound each, so a half a pound of meat/bones sounds like a reasonable guess
.
Geese! Get a quiet breed if you have neighbors (Pilgrims are my favorite with American Buffs a close second), make a little pen for them and put them to work mowing your lawn. Or when you mow the lawn immediately collect the cuttings and toss them in the goose pen. After the first few weeks geese literally grow on grass. They are extremely disease resistant, have excellent personalities and provide eggs for sale, eating (they're huge) or for crafts (I love painting goose eggs - you have more freedom to get into detail). The down can be harvested if you want to play around with making pillows or, well, anything else that needs to be stuffed, and, of course, meat.
Geese grow rapidly with very little out of pocket cost. They will need to have supplemental feed over the winter and any breeding pairs you keep can be costly if winters are long and hard where you are. Keeping a single breeding pair and letting them hatch out a clutch or two will provide tons of meat to put in the freezer for the rest of the year. At 8-12 eggs a clutch you're looking at a goose dinner once or twice a month all year round.
Rabbits are expensive to get into and take a little longer to get set up. They will require housing (no chicken wire - they can eat right through that if they're bored) and nestboxes (we always tried to keep 15 on hand for 50 does) and, regardless of what people try, you NEED a buck. I had too many incidents with people bringing me their does for a free breeding so they didn't have to bother with a buck and ended up without any babies at all. Stressed does can absorb litters and if they're annoyed or nervous they urinate, flushing out the semen. Most rabbits don't like cars, so a trip like that decreases your chances of the doe getting pregnant at all.
You'll also need to read up on rabbits. There are dozens of little tricks (as with everything else
that are good to know. What can be done if you find a litter of babies born on the wire? Or if the doe doesn't build a nice nest?
Once you get everything set up, rabbits do well. In 30 days a litter of 6-8 is born (I've had litters of up to 14 in some lines) and 8-12 weeks after that the fryers can be butchered. Rabbit meat can be tricky to cook for people (like me) who are use to the giant cornish-rocks you get at the grocery store, so line up some old fashioned recipes and see which one works best for you. We always cut ours up into bite sized pieces and fried them up.
Good luck with whatever you try. If you're low on money I highly recommend finding a way to sell every little thing in whatever you raise: feathers, fur, eggshells, manure, lucky items (rabbit feet), and so on.
