Is it worth it?

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Originally Posted by PatriotPythons

I think that it would be worth it for you to breed your own feeders. If you're spending $2.00 for one rat now, which is a pretty normal price, then you will be spending $16 a week on feeders. That comes to $832 a year.

You would need to produce 32 rats per month to feed your collection.

This means that you should probably have four breeding females to sustain your snakes.

This means that you will need two racks for your rats. One to breed rats in and another to grow them to the size that you require for for food. With ball pythons they really never get big enough to require colossal rats so you won't have to grow them out for all that long.

Two racks, if you build them using Jumbo doskocil litter pans will run you about $300 depending on the price of materials where you are located. If you're not good at building things and you need to pay someone else to build them for you then expect it to cost about twice that much.

Kiln dried, sifted, dust free pine is the bedding of choice for most rat breeders. If you pay $6 for a big bale of this pine it would be about right. For 12 Jumbo litter pans, you will go through a big bale of pine maybe every month if you are cleaning once per week. A big bag of rodent block can cost as much as $30 depending on where you get it.

After an initial outlay of $300 to build housing for your rats you will be spending about $36 per month to care for them. You are probably paying $64 a month for feeders now, so lets do the math.

$300 to build racks.
$36 per month for feed and pine.

This brings your total cost to $732 for the first year that you breed rats.

This is a savings of $100 over buying feeders.

In your second year you will save about $400 because you will have already repaid the cost of building your racks and will not have to incur that cost a second time.

Also, as was previously mentioned, if you sell your extra rats you can help offset the cost of feed and pine. If you decide to breed fancy rats and sell them as pet you will certainly offset the costs.

If you keep four pairs of rats together all the time you will produce about 48 rats every month. This is a dozen more than you need. If you breed dumbo rats you will certainly have no problems getting $3 a piece for weaned rats and you can make $36 per month. That is EXACTLY what your feed and pine costs.

With that knowledge you can feed your snakes for free.

Don't get any wild ideas of breeding a ton of rats to make money. This is a virtual impossibility on the scale that you are operating on and the market is a crazy place for rodent breeders. However, you should have no problems selling a dozen rats per month using craigslist, facebook, reptile classifieds, etc or wherever you can list them at no cost to you.

However you decide to proceed I wish you the best of luck in your journey. Breeding rats can be fun if you enjoy them. It can also be a big money saver as well.

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I have 9 breeding females and run a 1.3 ratio in a 6 tub rack and 4 for breeders and 2 for grow outs separated by sex my rats usually reach large size by the time they are 6-7 weeks 3 of the breeder tubs are for the harems and one breeder tub is for the males when I remove them from the females after litters are starting to be born and they go back with females 2 weeks after weaning so you wouldn't necessarily have to have 2 racks if you only need a few per month I serve 25-30 rats per month but I am also stocking up for my december 2013 switch gassing my current breeders and bringing in new ones we also have a few friends that buy our extras anything above that or over 1 full month stock in the freezer goes to the local nature center. another thing you need to consider is rather you feed f/t or live, if you feed f/t a co2 chamber is a good investment it only cost me aprox 60$ to get mine setup and a air fill is like 3$ I can gas 20-30 rats at a shot twice a month before needing a refill on a 20oz bottle