I just finished my guide to selecting the right tilapia species for home tilapia farms and commercial aquaculture and while I was doing my research, boy was I surprised at all the misleading information out there.
It's amazing how many tilapia hatcheries there are in south Florida pushing Nile tilapia as the be-all end-all of tilapia farming in the United States, when most of the country has winter weather to consider. I mean these boys in florida have never even see a snowflake, but they talk about Nile tilapia as if they won't die if the water falls below 60 degrees. They clearly have never tried to keep water above 70 degrees when its overcast and below 32 degrees outside for weeks at a time. One guy even suggested that tilapia farms use solar water heating... Using what sun?
Isn't the whole idea of farming your own tilapia at home to save money and achieve a higher quality? How exactly do you do that when you spend 5 dollars per pound in electricity?
It's time for a reality check. Visit my article called Live Tilapia Selection Guide on our main website and see what you think.
Wednesday, July 31, 2013
Sunday, June 23, 2013
If Rube Goldberg Was A Tilapia Farmer
Tilapia farming is actually pretty easy. Simply give your fingerlings a healthy place grow for six to nine months and you will be rewarded with a harvest of greater value than their cost to raise. And that's really the name of the game isn't it? To raise your Tilapia for as little as possible while maintaining the quality you are looking for and then getting a greater value in return.
I mean honestly, Tilapia can survive in some pretty horrible conditions and still wind up in the grocery store. We've all seen the muddy looking filets of farm raised Nile tilapia from China and thought, "why is the meat brownish?". You can just picture those poor tilapia swimming in water so thick and dark that it looks like raw sewage. Or, if you don't have that good of an imagination, you can always see them on YouTube.
For a US tilapia farmer to be competitive, a balance between quality (which for our purposes is the visual appeal of the filets) and the cost to raise them must be found. The imported filets are hard to beat sometimes. Their farming methods, while repulsive to most of us in the US, are very cheap. At my own local store, farm raised tilapia filets from American sources are at 6.99 per pound while the imported tilapia from Indonesia is only 3.99 per pound. Of course as a tilapia farmer, I know why there's a difference in price, but I'm afraid that the public doesn't know or even really care. Thank goodness for whoever thought up pure white "Tilapia Loins". We've got to take advantage of every angle until we can find a way to educate the consumer about quality.
So is there such a thing as too much quality? Well I recently saw a video on YouTube that makes me think so. In the video, the tilapia farmer has created a masterpiece of pipes and valves and tanks that Rube Goldberg would have appreciated. Rube Goldberg was an american artist and inventor most famous for his popular cartoons depicting overly complex systems performing the simplest tasks in the most convoluted ways. In his video, the tilapia farmer goes all over his pipes and tanks as if he is caressing a lover. You can hear in his voice how impressed he is with the industrial feel of his set up. The beauty of his schematics and symmetry of his pipes. It's almost as if his tilapia were an after-thought.
In the end, he is probably producing some of the cleanest tilapia on earth, almost sterile, but why? Clearly, he is farming for personal use because the cost of his own filets would be over 20 dollars per pound. I'd hate to think that a new tilapia farming startup would see this farmer's video and try to copy his system. It would take years to recover the start up costs that way.
So I guess my message is this: Don't lose sight of the whole point of farming tilapia in an obsessive pursuit of quality. Use cheap and simple methods to raise clean tilapia. Keep their water clear with constant water changes by continually bringing in fresh water at a rate of between 5 and 10 percent of pond capacity per day. Keep your filtration systems simple and minimal. Water flows through filter pads first then through charcoal and bio media before heading back to the pond. Keep water systems separated between ponds to mitigate health risks. We have step by step instructions for building a cheap and simple home tilapia pond on our website, Backyard Tilapia.
The whole goal of tilapia farming is to save money or even make a profit, not impress the amateur engineer in you with complex pipes, blinking lights and LED displays.
I mean honestly, Tilapia can survive in some pretty horrible conditions and still wind up in the grocery store. We've all seen the muddy looking filets of farm raised Nile tilapia from China and thought, "why is the meat brownish?". You can just picture those poor tilapia swimming in water so thick and dark that it looks like raw sewage. Or, if you don't have that good of an imagination, you can always see them on YouTube.
For a US tilapia farmer to be competitive, a balance between quality (which for our purposes is the visual appeal of the filets) and the cost to raise them must be found. The imported filets are hard to beat sometimes. Their farming methods, while repulsive to most of us in the US, are very cheap. At my own local store, farm raised tilapia filets from American sources are at 6.99 per pound while the imported tilapia from Indonesia is only 3.99 per pound. Of course as a tilapia farmer, I know why there's a difference in price, but I'm afraid that the public doesn't know or even really care. Thank goodness for whoever thought up pure white "Tilapia Loins". We've got to take advantage of every angle until we can find a way to educate the consumer about quality.
So is there such a thing as too much quality? Well I recently saw a video on YouTube that makes me think so. In the video, the tilapia farmer has created a masterpiece of pipes and valves and tanks that Rube Goldberg would have appreciated. Rube Goldberg was an american artist and inventor most famous for his popular cartoons depicting overly complex systems performing the simplest tasks in the most convoluted ways. In his video, the tilapia farmer goes all over his pipes and tanks as if he is caressing a lover. You can hear in his voice how impressed he is with the industrial feel of his set up. The beauty of his schematics and symmetry of his pipes. It's almost as if his tilapia were an after-thought.
In the end, he is probably producing some of the cleanest tilapia on earth, almost sterile, but why? Clearly, he is farming for personal use because the cost of his own filets would be over 20 dollars per pound. I'd hate to think that a new tilapia farming startup would see this farmer's video and try to copy his system. It would take years to recover the start up costs that way.
So I guess my message is this: Don't lose sight of the whole point of farming tilapia in an obsessive pursuit of quality. Use cheap and simple methods to raise clean tilapia. Keep their water clear with constant water changes by continually bringing in fresh water at a rate of between 5 and 10 percent of pond capacity per day. Keep your filtration systems simple and minimal. Water flows through filter pads first then through charcoal and bio media before heading back to the pond. Keep water systems separated between ponds to mitigate health risks. We have step by step instructions for building a cheap and simple home tilapia pond on our website, Backyard Tilapia.
The whole goal of tilapia farming is to save money or even make a profit, not impress the amateur engineer in you with complex pipes, blinking lights and LED displays.
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