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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

Tags: Shrip, Fairy, Shrimp, Brine

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

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Comment by Carey Ma on January 20, 2012 at 9:35pm: @ Ellen: Sorry, I've been out of Labs for years so no answer but interesting idea. I would guess the nutritional yield would be similar to lichen and mosses.

Well if the fish eat it then worst come to worse it may be good roughage. Does it grow fast enough to actually feed your fish or how much do you compliment?

Comment by Ellen Roelofs on January 20, 2012 at 10:55am: Anybody know anything about the nutritional value of hornwort? I am growing it floating in all my ornamental tanks and feeding it to my tilapia. I do this because I have the plant and it grows quickly, however, I have not seen any kind of nutritional information for hornwort (I can find lots on what it needs to grow, but not on its value as a food source).

Comment by Carey Ma on November 12, 2011 at 3:48pm: I agree. Pulp mostly contains cellulose and should be fed to animals that need/ want a high cellulose diet. Worms and/ or rabbits would be my first choice. Feeding veggie pulp to fish only adds roughage. Cellulose is best broken down by microbes so the compost bin would be my third choice to keep the nute loop closed.

Comment by Dave & Yvonne Story on November 12, 2011 at 7:40am: I am going to try Sylvia's tilapia feed for my next purchase. I supplement the feed with carrot tops and bok choi, which they seem to like. I give it to them whole and green (not dried), they eat it all. I will keep trying other plants, as well. Most of my plant material goes into my worm bin

Comment by Rick Stillwagon on November 11, 2011 at 7:25pm: Biomatter press... Look up pellet mills. They make many types and sizes. One company here in the US is Pellet Pros.

Comment by Local Roots Aquaponics on November 11, 2011 at 6:19pm: We recently tried this, feeding our fish the juice mash. Our koi & goldfish were more interested than the tilapia. We will keep trying different mixes.

Comment by TCLynx on November 11, 2011 at 6:14pm: See if they will eat it, If not it will make great worm or BSF larva food.

Comment by Chris McMahon on November 11, 2011 at 5:44pm: My wife started a juice diet. Basically she juices all vegetables and drinks juice all the time. Anyway I have a lot of vegetables leftovers here. Can I turn it into tilapia food somehow?

Comment by Mörður Gunnarsson Ottesen on October 4, 2011 at 4:53am: It would be great to get some feed recipes.
Does anyone have recipes for Koi or Comet goldfish?