It's been a while since I made a post here on Hive and my reason for been away was due to tight schedules that really took that time from making me to write and post contents. However it's good to be back again in doing so and this time I have something different to post about.
My aunt and I have been running a catfish business for a while which I would say is really not an easy one because in the process we have to spend a lot especially in their feeding where we have to buy the fish feed almost all the time to ensure the fishes in pond have something to eat daily for better and faster growth.
The fish feed really cost a lot which also depends on the particular feed we want because as the fish begins to add weight so as their feed begin to change because it's a gradual process that occurs in stages. In a day this fishes consume 3 bags of feed and probably the reason is because of the amount of fishes we have in the pond which is around eight thousand fishes.
The daily consumption of feed is really a challenge because a bag of fish feed for 6mm is 23,500 naira and if we should multiply that amount by 3 a day is around $60. Sometimes if we don't give the fishes the feed to eat we look for cabbage and vegetables which also helps them in growing as well.
Image designed by me
However my aunt and I then make research on how we can produce our own feed which I would love to share with you guys. The place we normally go to buy the fish feed is also the same place we can get the materials in making our own fish feed.
The process
The first thing we did was to buy the machine that would be used in producing the fish feed which is known as the pelleting machine and also we bought grinding machine as well because both will be used for the production of the feed.
There is really a lot of process involve in producing the fish feed and this is due to the fact that there's a lot of materials needed in mixing before we could go ahead in pelleting.
We have materials like corn, soya bean, blood meal, fish prefix which needs to be grinded in powder form because all the materials needs to be in that form for proper mixing and easy pelleting.
Probably in my next post I would share the materials and photos of how I mix the materials together and also how I use the grinding machine in turning those materials I mentioned earlier to powder form.
However, the materials needed for the fish feed pelleting have measurements because we can't just mix the materials needed without proper measurements and this measurements needs scale in doing so. It also depends on the quantity your producing that may have changes in your measurements.
My measurements I use when pelleting is 14kg of corn, 5kg of blood meal, 30kg of soya bean, 10kg of GNC, 500g of fish prefix and other materials that requires 1kg like salt and vitamin c.
After the whole mixing, I would then scale the quantity needed for the day to pellet. The final mixing requires adding water which would make the production of feed to flow easily in the pelleting machine. There are different sizes of plate or blade used in pelleting but this particular pelleting am using 9mm to pellet.
There is no much stress when pelleting the only thing is ensure that your fish feed is coming out fine. Though, your mixing should be properly made because if there isn't enough water in the mixing, the fish feed wouldn't come out fine and if there's excess water as well it wouldn't be appropriate as well.
After pelleting the next thing is to dry the fish feed and why we do so is to ensure the feed is hard so that the fishes can easily see and eat it but if we decide to feed them immediately, the feed will dissolve immediately in the water which probably is a loss in doing so.
Another interesting part about this feed is that even dogs and chicken likes eating it because it's also their food as well. After drying for like two days we then scale like 40kg of feed that will be used in feeding the fishes for a day.
But before we scale, there's a net we use in removing materials that didn't pellet well so as to pellet them again.
After that we then proceed in feeding the fishes in the pond. The pond is 6ft deep with a lot of fishes inside and with time I believe there would be a lot of progress coming out of it.
All the image used are mine and in my next post I will share more about the mixing and grinding of materials.