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Making your own feed
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For those in terested in making their own fish food.
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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 Dave & Yvonne Story on February 22, 2012 at 9:01am
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I am looking for a good system to grow sprouts.. any suggestions?
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Comment by David Owens on February 22, 2012 at 7:05am
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Thanks Carey. I grow lots of wheat grass and other micro greens for my family to eat and give the excess to the fish. I am not quite as good at the bean sprouts but I will give it a try. I figure the more self sustained input I can provide the less I will have to rely on those commercial pellets. I would love to figure out a way to have an organic feed I can make, that can supply most if not all of the necessary inputs for my fish to grow quickly and supply my plants with the elements they need as well. Thanks for sharing all of your knowledge! It is fascinating reading all of the things you have done and are doing. Great articles!
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Comment by Carey Ma on February 22, 2012 at 12:19am
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Great example David. You might try growing some by yourself. It's easy. I make sprouts every day for all my animals, more in the winter and less in the summer.
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Every time we buy bean sprouts we never seem to eat the whole bag. I feed them to my Blue Tilapia and they love it!
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Don't forget that sprouts are a good source of nutrition. Grow some sprouts of grass/ fodder with your left over seeds. Chop em up and feed them to your fish.
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Comment by Raychel A Watkins on January 31, 2012 at 11:58pm
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http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/waste_mgt/smit ... les/A2.pdf
read this report completely and you can see the advantage of BSF larvae. Take note of amounts used to obtain best results in catfish fingerlings
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Comment by Kirsten Udd on January 29, 2012 at 2:47pm
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David, just be patient, it won't take as long as you think. Save your $. This guy has great BSFL advice. See if you can glean anything from him http://diyaquaponics.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=83&t=1331
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@ David S: I use to make my own feed when i had more than five hundred tail of fish. I also made feed when I was working with an NGO that had a decent sized pond. Now I have several types of Ap involvement including a small home system and a small Ap store. I also actively consult with different agricultural entities in hopes of integrating other aspects of farming to reduce down-line byproduct waste for more ecologically appropriate management. I manage three ponds totaling almost three acres for a feed manufacture and next year hope to cooperate with a few fish farmers to introduce Ap as a form of biomitigation while increasing profits.
As for BSFs: I have no clue because I don't have enough information. How long have you had them? How much waste/ food input is available daily? How much do they eat%? How big is your grow container? What is the surface area? How many fish do you have to feed? How much money do you have? How much do they cost? If you have a kit; what does the manufacture suggest?
Two things to remember. One is that there cannot be too many, only too few. If their food input supply is fairly constant, they will increase/ decrease automatically to a balance. Two; If conditions are appropriate, it still takes a required amount of time to mature. I suggest maybe run it a few cycles and see if the total output is what you need. If you are putting too much food for them to soon and rotting occurs, lessen the amount of your input. You may run a new system of larger variety to compare output efficiency.
I don't raise BSF deliberately like I do with red-worms and crickets. They come naturally in the compost pile which is where I put my molting or recuperating hens.
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Comment by David Schwinghamer on January 29, 2012 at 12:52pm
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I need some advise, I mistakenly bought extra small bsfl from phoenix worm hoping to make a colony to feed my fish. I bought about 300 and yes they do eat but it seems it will take longer than I want for them to get bigger and start laying eggs. Now im thinking I should buy some large ones to kickstart the process, how many do you think I should buy?
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Comment by Ellen Roelofs on January 21, 2012 at 7:09pm
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@Carey: No, it's currently about 25% of their diet by volume. The rest is pellets and whatever they can catch on their own.
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