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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 TCLynx on May 12, 2012 at 5:28am
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I was just making note that the solid fish waste if sent directly into the duckweed bed can make a really nasty stinky anaerobic mess.
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Comment by Jon Parr on May 12, 2012 at 12:19am
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Now I'm gonna have to go search byap just to see what you're talking about, Eric. Thanks. And I was just about to turn in for the night
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Comment by Eric Warwick on May 11, 2012 at 11:13pm
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@Jon, not exactly (can't tell if you were being sarcastic). Nice picture though, definately not as revolting as stuff from BYAP.
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http://aquaponicscommunity.com/group/arizona-aquaponics/forum/topic...
posted a couple more bsfl pics here, in a similar discussion, sort of
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Not really, George. We occasionally sell or give rabbits to folks, but primarily they are just another meat source for the family. We have 6-8 does and a buck, and they pop a dozen babies each every couple of months. The babies are about 4-5 lbs in 10 weeks. Quick math puts me conservatively at about 500 lbs of rabbit per year to butcher, or about 10 lbs per week. Of the 10, I'd guess about 6 or 7 of it is guts, fur, and bones, and 3-4 lbs of meat for the table. Not really sure about that, never measured. Anyway, that 6-7 lbs of guts translates to 1 1/2 pounds of BSFL grubs which directly feed the fish, resulting in a pound or so of fish. We have been slow about breeding them this year, too many projects
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Comment by George on May 11, 2012 at 9:49pm
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Jon, that's a lot of rabbit entrails. Are you selling rabbits? We hunted them years ago and definitely shot too many of them a couple of times when it came time to clean them. I've not seen BSF activity yet here at home in N. Fla and that surprises me. I've cultivated BSF for three years now but never paid close attention to when I had larvae, exactly. I'm ready to ramp up production this year.
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Comment by Dave & Yvonne Story on May 11, 2012 at 9:27pm
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floating food is not prefered by tilapia, usually.
Watch your fish as you fry, they prefer decay on the bottom, but learn to eat floating food.
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Comment by David Owens on May 11, 2012 at 9:12pm
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Awesome! I have a strong stomach so of course, now I want to do it!
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So, Eric, what you're saying is you want to see a picture? I can do that
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Oh John, I've seen some of the forums they have on BYAP with this--they've got pictures that make you want to either puke, or do it yourself.
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