Aquaponic Gardening

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Hello everyone,

I am new to aquaponics.  My husband has always had an aquarium, 15+ years of his life.  We live on a small farm in middle Tennessee.  I thought aquaponics would be a good addition to our farm.  My husband was skeptical.  I set up a 50 gallon FT with a ST below (it's in a 50 gallon container but of course fluctuates) and 3 grow beds connected with PVC equalling about 75 gallons.  I use river pebble as my media.  I planted romaine arugula and spinach seeds three days ago and today the arugula is sprouting!!!!  My husband was shocked!  I also, cleaned up the roots of a few plants from outside and added them to the GB.  My husband is pleasantly surprised and no longer a skeptic.

 

I have a few questions:

How many Tilapia can I grow to full size in this set-up?  If I use this set-up to start my fingerlings then how long would I have to get another system going to be ready for the larger fish?  Is there a simple way to calculated number of fish, fish size and gallons?  For example, if I bought 30 Blue Tilapia fingerlings how long would they last in my current set-up?  We have our system set-up in the basement but would like to move outside once we can get a passive solar greenhouse built.  

 

My husband used to raise and breed african Cichlids (Lake Malawi).  My understanding is the Tilapia are of the same family.  We would like to start our own breeder colony.  Here in TN we can legally grow Blue, Nile and Mosambique Tilapia.  Are there reputable fish "stores" on-line to purchase these fish.  Can I grow straight strains of Blue, Nile or Mosambique and have a large nice tasting fish?  I've heard of breeding two types to get mainly male(hybrids)?  Anyone have experience with this or comments?  Right now we have fish borrowed from hubby's aquarium.  

 

Thank you in advance for any help provided.

Debbie

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Hi Debbie.  In general you can grow out one fish (or one pound of fish) for every 5 - 10 gallons of water (see the Aquaponic Gardening Rules of Thumb document for more info and tips).  Your challenge, however, is going to be growing them to full size in such a small tank.  My understanding is that 50 gallons is the limit case for how small of a tank you can use to grow an edible fish to maturity.  You may be better off sticking with ornamentals...but if you decide to stick with tilapia we will be selling Blues in a couple of weeks (see the Shop tab above)  If you sign up for our email list you will get the announcement as to when we are officially shipping.

With only 75 gallons of grow bed, I would start with only 10 fish.  I would also recommend you cycle up the system fishlessly before getting fish, especially if you are going to get 30 fingerlings rather than 10.  With tilapia, if you are keeping the water warm and feeding them a good high protein grower feed for the young fish, you may only have a matter of a couple months before you are grossly overstocked if you get 30 fingerlings so you better be starting on the bigger system now so you can start cycling it up fishlessly about the same time you put the first fingerlings in the little system in order to have it ready in time to space the fish out better.  All that said, 10 tilapia in a 50 gallon tank are going to be rather crowded by the time they get to plate size.

 

I think the special breeding to get the all male offspring actually requires the original adult male of the hybred breeding pair be a super male wich requires some special hormone process or something in his breeding.

Thank you Sylvia.  I will keep an eye out for the blue tilapia.

Thank you TCLynx.  I had to start out real small to show my husband how it all works.  We have room to add a much larger system in the basement.  In time I'll get that started.  My brain wants to separate all the fish by age but can a tilapia fingerling be in a tank with a fish almost full size?  Is that what everyone does?  A large (300+ gallon) tank with a mixture of fish sizes?  I thought the larger would eat the smaller.  

 

I don't want anything to do with artificial hormones.  I'll have to keep researching fish.  

 

Do you know of anyone ever testing their veggies and fish for plastic leaching and their level of nutrients?  I'm curious as to the nutrient level of both.

The fry and very small fingerlings have an intense protein hunger and will gladly eat the smaller fry or fingerlings than themselves if they are not being feed well.  The adults don't seem to have much interest in eating smaller fish most of the time and aggression among tilapia usually has more to do with breeding than eating except for among the very small fish.

 

The bigger problem with tilapia may be more to do with over population of small fish.  When I had mixed gender tilapia I wanted to grow out I would keep them in a cage in a bigger tank so they couldn't access the bottom to breed.  The breeders were in a separate tank and then I would collect the fry I wanted to keep and put them in an aquarium till they were big enough to go to the cage.

I also found that excess tilapia fingerlings of about the size of pumpkin seeds make wonderful chicken snacks.  See the problem is usually too much breeding with tilapia provided the temperatures are right.

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