Hello everyone,
I am going to explain in this thread step by step process to creat your own fish food. But first allow me to introduce myself as i am new to the byap forum.
My name is Amgad an Egyptian living in KSA atm. I work as a chemist and i am new to Aquaponics but not new to raising fish. I am now specialized in breeding and raising Discus.
I have been making my discus food myself for several years now and i learned how to formulate fish food better every time. When i started my AP system i started to think of the ingredients i am going to include in my tilapia food and my approach was to make it as cheap as possible for it to be economical without sacrificing nutrition.
Basically to make your food complete you have to provide in it all the nutrients your fish needs. These can be categorized in to Protein, Fats, vitamins, minerals and carbohydrates.
Proteins can be of animal or plant origins and are the mass builders for fish
Fats are important as they provide higher energy than protein but only unsaturated fats can be used by fish. Providing a source of unsaturated fatty acids such as omega3 will allow the fish to use it for energy, thus saving the protein for growth.
Vitamins and minerals are essential for the fish vitality and body functions
Carbohydrates, are not really important in fish nutrition and most fish cant digest it.
In addition to the above there are feed enrichments and these IMO make all the difference.
Let me start explaining the preparation process and explain what enrichments do i use and how are they beneficial.
I will start by listing the ingredient list:
White fish fillet 300g
Shrimps. 130g
Frozen Minced beef. 100g
Frozen minced chicken 150g
Spinach. 400g
Peas and carrots 200g
Crushed soy bean 100g
Crushed corn. 100g
Yeast. 70 g
Multivitamins minerals & amino acid. 30g
Spirulina 1tsp
Paracoccus bacteria 1 tsp
Brown bread flour
Here you can see all the meat components cleaned, de-shelled and chopped
Frozen peas and carrots
First i start by blending the vegetables and i do so in batches, it is important to do this instead of mixing everything together in a food processor at one because this will leave big chunks or stems and will make the mix less homogenous
Here is how the spinach, peas and carrots looked like after blending
These are the spirulina, paracoccus, vitamins, minerals and amino acid mix. The amino acids included are lysine and methoniene as those are usually the first limiting essential amino acids
In a bowl i will sprinkle the above mentioned enrichments to the meaty parts and mix them well, at this stage i decided to add a bit of paprika and garlic powder.
This is how it looked like after mixing them well, a small amount of spirulina goes a long way. You can see how its green color dominated
Now i will add in the veggies to the bowl and mix them well with hand, this order and way is important to make sure the enrichments are distributed well in the mix
Now i will blend the mix in a food processor
Here are the soybean, corn and yeast. I will place the blended mix in a bowl pour these on it and start mixing
Then i will add the brown bread flour as a binder and mix until it is close to a dough feeling. ( a better alternative is wheat gluten as it is a better binder and a protein food as well)
In the end it should look close to this
I then weigh from 100-110 g portions into 17x20 ziplock bags this will give me aprox less than 3mm thickness. This is important so it can thaw directly after placed in the water.
After that just place the stack of ziplock bags in the freezer, then snap of pieces when its feeding time and place it directly for the fish. The low thickness will allow it to thaw instantly, at least in our warm weather. If thats not the case for you thaw the food before feeding.
In a previous mix i took this daw then used a manual mincer to make them into pellet shape and sun dried then, this way you can convert it to your DIY fish pellets.
Thats it, i hope someone would benefit from this thread.
Thanks for reading.
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(probably a few other factors too). This seems to be an area where the jury is still out (parts of carbohydrate metabolism are still a gray area even in humans, where a lot more research has been done)