Goldfish home-made food

[Eric T]

Hi, I'm interested in raising goldfish for less than $1/lb, and so obviously purchasing fish food is not an option.  Do you think that a diet consisting of BSFL, duckweed, red composting worms, and peas is a healthy mix?  I've been reading about how someone feeds his BSFL with horse meal ($8 for 50 lb bag) as well as food scraps, then uses the larvae effluent to grow duckweed, and uses the larvae castings to feed the red worms.  I could grow the peas in regular old dirt (fertilized of course with the castings).

Thanks for your opinions on this.

[George]

Well, forget Skretting if you're just looking for cheap.  Shipping for 40 lbs is about $60 to my place.

George said:

Skretting.us has a downloadable brochure about their company and sources. 

[Eric T]

Thank-you all for your input so far.  I've already contacted my local feed store and they are a Purina distributor so they can get that feed.  For the moment, I'm just using aquarium goldfish flakes, because I just set up my AP system and the fish are pretty tiny.  To clarify, my goal is to spend less than $1 to produce 1 lb of goldfish.  That means the feed should cost a good fraction less than $1/lb, since the conversion of food to goldfish flesh is less than 1.  The reason for this goal is that I help to rehab wild seabirds, and currently we buy smelt that is $1/lb, and I'd like to set up an AP system that can compete with that.  So, I'm first building a small demo system, but then if I can demonstrate it can be done, then I'll expand it.

I'll definitely check out those low-cost commercial feeds that have been suggested, but really I'd like to make my own food, and am trying to determine a healthy mix.  I also live near the sea, so have easy access to seaweed (giant kelp, etc).  So, I thought the following mix would be healthy: peas, seaweed, duckweed, BSFL, and red compost worms.  Maybe also some spinach leaves, grown in the AP system itself.

Thanks again for your help so far!

[Carey Ma]

I say go for it Eric. Try out your homemade formula and let us know.

Cheers

[Garrett Blair]

Hi Eric,

I'm new to aquaponics, but I've been doing some digging on fish feed, I stumbled on this article http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/fa097 . They do a good job of breaking all the ingredients down, and even have a few recipes, It looks like a lot of work, but if I had to pick a recipe to start with, the last one in the publication (gelitin based) looks like it the easiest to put together, not saying I'm going to do it, but its a informative article on fish feed, worth checking out.

 

Garrett