Rabbit crossbreeding project has hit a snag - or a bit different direction?

The NZ buck, now named Chester, is 5 months old, so we can try breeding him for fall litters, once it starts to cool off.

The AmChin “doe”, on the other hand...seems to be a buck. I was unsure about the sex when I bought it, and it was only 6.5 weeks old (not my preference to buy so young, but technically ok for livestock sales), but I trusted the seller’s judgement. I moved him out of quarantine today, so I gave him a good going-over for health, nail trim, etc, and now that he’s older, hmmm that sure does look like a penis.

I wanted a buck and a doe to add to the herd, for maximum crossbreeding variety. So the question now is, what if I add two bucks? The seller said she’d replace him if he turned out to be a buck, but idk if I want to do that because 1) she probably doesn’t have another litter available right now, and 2) I don’t really want to start the quarantine-waiting-growing up timeline over again.

Problem #1 is that I’d have three bucks. That’s too many. I mean to retire Digit the SF to an experimental colony at some point, which would get him out of the barn, but first we’ll have to build the colony - no small feat.

The real thing I’m contemplating, though, is whether two bucks would *work* as a crossbreeding program. Or would it work better or worse than one of each sex. I have come to no real conclusions. Maybe it would be good that the first gen would all be 50% known stock? And I’d be saving all does in that generation, and I’d have these two bucks (plus maybe Digit) to cross back to. Perhaps that’s better than needing to save F1 bucks for backcrossing? Since I wouldn’t need more bucks anyway. But maybe it would dilute the known quantity too much, take too much from the good things about the SF I’ve been working with.