A Community and Forum For Aquaponic Gardeners
Making your own feed
Information
For those in terested in making their own fish food.
Members: 249
Latest Activity: Dec 18, 2020
Making my own fish food.
The reason I started making my own feed was because I wanted to know and control what my fish eat and lower that portion of my overhead.
There are several factors when dealing with making your own feed. Sometimes it is not cost effective for a business to make its own feeds, while some hobbyists will go to any extreme as long as they get results. I classify myself in the second category.
The first factor is to find the diet requirements for the particular species of fish you grow. Try to find out what they eat in the wild, when and how often. Are they plant eaters or carnivores? What is the protein content ratio?
The second thing I look at is maturity. What stage of maturity are these particular fish going through?
And the third question I ask is what season is the feed for?
To make things less artificial and more natural, I also ask what their natural environment is like. What do they like and dislike.
I started out many years ago raising Fancy Guppies and Siamese Fighting fish and supplemented their flake diet with mosquito larva I raised in a tank on the side. Live food always seems to perk them up so I have continued this practice to this day. Today I have a 10 x 20 “bug shed” attached to one of the greenhouses, raising crickets, red wigglers, meal worms, mosquito larva, grubs and black solider fly larva for my chickens and fish as both live and pelleted feed.
To be as sustainable as possible, I do not use wild or farm raised fish to feed my fish. The only way my fish get fed is through recycling of waste from another process. For example: By using aquaponics, I produce about three times more bio matter compared to field/ bed (dirt) raised crops. I divide this into four groups. One goes to compost, another to feed livestock, the third pile is for the insects and lastly a pile to make feed.
I try to follow natures lead and prescribe to her patterns so I use grains more sparingly as a direct feed and instead feed it to the insects that naturally consume them.
So the next thing to consider is what portion of what. After you figure what you want in the feed it is a simple matter to grind you ingredients with a food processor until you have a fine powder. Next is to choose what you want to use as a binder. I use a combination of seaweed and blue-green algae as my binder along with starches that come naturally.
Today I use a commercial bio-matter press to produce my pellets but you can do the same thing in a smaller scale with a spaghetti press.
I hope this interest some of you. Please feel free to contact me with any questions. I’ll try to respond in a reasonable fashion.
Cheers
Discussion Forum
mosquito fish as feeders
Started by Aaron Hardiman Apr 7, 2015. 0 Replies 0 Likes
anyone raise any feeder fish?Here is an abstract to a paper that fed mosquito fish to barramundi with positive results. Ive read mosquito fish are maybe the easiest fish to breed and require very…Continue
Brine Shrimp, Fairy Shrip
Started by Bob Campbell. Last reply by Michael Garver Jr. Mar 26, 2015. 7 Replies 0 Likes
I'm wondering if anyone has tried to raise brine shrimp for fish food. I found this paper which seems to have…Continue
thanks for the most usefull info source ive found yet :)
Started by larry poe May 30, 2014. 0 Replies 0 Likes
love the info and ideas from this group. already found lots of useful stuff for not only my AP but for the rest of the farm as well.Continue
Is it possible to reproduce Duckweed along with Tilapia in an IBC tank? Goal - Lowering ammonia & oxygination with DuckWeed, while avoiding over feeding.
Started by Irvin Carrero. Last reply by TCLynx Mar 4, 2014. 27 Replies 0 Likes
I could not make the duckweed proliferate in my Tilapia tank. They would not give it a chance to thrive if it was placed in their tank. This made me ask myself: What would happen if I added an…Continue
Tags: IBC, tank., Tilapia, a, proliferation
Comment Wall
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Comment by TC Keenan on August 26, 2014 at 12:01am
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Ran across a couple of useful links I don't see mentioned here, using (and farming) insects for fish (& poultry) feed:
http://www.feedipedia.org/content/about-feedipedia
http://www.fao.org/docrep/018/i3253e/i3253e00.htm
(see Chapters 7 & 8 in the latter, especially)
Cheers!
Tim
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Comment by Jon Parr on May 8, 2013 at 11:22am
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Great to hear, Carey. I'm just breaking ground on a giant AP project myself, adding 4500 sq ft per month until 8 acres of greenhouses are full. :D
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Comment by Carey Ma on May 7, 2013 at 10:53pm
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Thanks Jon for moderating. How are things going? I'm still crazy busy with setting up my new farm which I hope to plug an update soon, (prob mid/ late summer). Very exciting! We'll have 11 ponds totaling about 13 acres and will have AP or "natural" filtration/ bioremidiation. We plan to make our own feed starting next spring (if all goes as planned).
One of the realy exciting things is developing my "portable" integrated farm using old shipping containers as a base.
Catch ya'll soon.
Cheers
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Comment by Orion Dillon on May 7, 2013 at 11:12am
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What do people think about letting your fish eat comfrey... Mine seem to like it. I know they say it has alkaloids but its small amount, and chickens love it.
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No apologies needed, Jordan, and I honestly don't care if you're selling something. What I care about is getting my chain yanked, as well as the other 192 members of this group that are notified for each comment in this area, with an "ask me about..." sales tactic. So what are you selling? Get to the point, and if you believe in it start a thread above and engage in the wonder of forums.
Meanwhile, I fear you are talking out of your ass. Plants need 16 essential elements, and can absorb many more. Fish food (even lousy ones) and seaweed supplement supply all of these, and more.http://www.arbico-organics.com/downloads/maxicrop-kelp-analysis.pdf
More common than actual deficiencies in AP are high pH lockouts. If you contest, please do so, in proper format by starting a thread above. Common mineral or ash products like Azomite are dandy for soil, but they contain almost entirely mineral oxides, and are not (nor will they ever be) plant usable in an aerobic AP environment. And a brix meter is to measure sugars, and I fail to see the connection between brix and micro-nutrients.
I assume you are selling Bloomin Minerals? http://www.american-nutrition.com/soil.html
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Comment by Stephanie Bader on May 6, 2013 at 11:34pm
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So which mineral on this list do you think the average system is missing the most of?
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Chris, that was going to be my next question. lol
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Comment by Chris Carr on May 6, 2013 at 11:03pm
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Jordan, are you selling something?
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Careful, Jordan. Spammers get zapped.
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Is there a specific mineral that you find aquaponics is lacking? What kind of mineral additives are you using?
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