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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 Jon Parr on May 11, 2012 at 8:25pm
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Marty, not at all scientific, but my BSFL eat pretty much whatever I feed them, in one day, so long as the feed rate is somewhat consistent. And I believe the wet conversion of waste is about 20%, meaning 100 lbs of goop in, 20 lbs of worms out. I'm sure the feedstock will influence that ratio, but it's a starting point. If memory serves me, Dr. Olivier of the BioPod stated that he puts in 100 lbs of pig manure every day. I know that regularly put a 5 gallon bucket of rabbit entrails into my bin, and it is gone the next day. Gone. Only hair and bones remain after 24 hours. The fur becomes loose hair because the skin it was attached to is gone. Hope you weren't eating dinner
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Comment by marty lininger on May 11, 2012 at 8:21pm
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oh no - growing duckweed is the main idea. i want all the ammonia to go to duckweed production, and just a tad of veggie growing space with whatever is left over. i do plan on having 2 separate recirc systems. one for the fish, with a bio filter and screen filter. the filtered waste then goes to the duckweed loop, never to be seen again in the fish loop
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Comment by TCLynx on May 11, 2012 at 7:39pm
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Duckweed is a great ammonia sink but you are right, it takes a lot of space. Now if you were to use a settling tank of some sort to catch the solids and use a net/degassing tank before sending the water to the duckweed beds you will probably not need to deal with all the waste from the fish. If you remove the solids out to the soil gardens then you don't require as much plant bed to use up the minerals from the fish waste.
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Dave, have you pelletized any fish feed before? how is your success at making it float?
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Comment by Dave & Yvonne Story on May 11, 2012 at 12:06pm
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I like azolla, chaya, moringa, and egg yoke mixed together with chicken parts not eaten. They are all easy to grow on a farm. If someone can come up with a percentage.. I will grind and mix these into a pellet. See what happens or I will do it after I build my chicken coop.
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regarding BSF. does anyone have information regarding production capacity over time? all i could find on WWW was 17.5 #/SF-year, but that article was not too clear.
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good points Chris. at the suggestion of Paul Trudeau i have been spending time on BSF research and am glad to do it. i had grown weary of bugs after researching crickets, grasshoppers and redworms and thought BSF another rabbit hole. here i now sit with my initial 330 SF BSF building plans...
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Comment by Chris Carr on May 11, 2012 at 11:07am
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I was using it as 100% feed to try and account for the nitrogen in a full circle to see if the quantities and constants made sense. I think the degree of error is just too much to come up with a semi accurate number.
You likely cant feed the fish 100% duckweed because its amino acid composition is likely not 100% ideal for fish protein requirements so multiple(or at least 2) protein sources are needed and of course all of the micro nutrients as you pointed out. It is probably lacking in energy(carbs/fat) somewhat too.
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thanks Chris.
this is for growing duckweed, not feeding it, if that is what you are thinking.
while i intend to use other feed sources, i wonder, if grow speed is not a factor, why you could not use duckweed alone if it was seeded with the minerals the fish needs?
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Sorry
As soon as my mind knows there is math.. I shut down.
I have had to deal with that my whole life. Anyway, I have tried the yoke out of a bioiled egg. I have one of my males who will fight all for it. So I have started breaking it up into small pieces.. My fish seem to like it. I just started to add it into my new fry tank.. let you know what happens. Or comment back to me .. good or bad.
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