Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I approached a certified organic animal feed producer last year about the possibility of producing organic fish food, and now it seems they are ready to do it, the only problem being that the production run has to be quite large.

My wife and I are local distributors for them, mainly for chook food (most of which we use ourselves), but also a few bags of dog, and cow/sheep/cattle/goat pellets.

With the mods indulgence, at this stage I'm just trying to determine if there is much demand for organic fish pellets in NSW/Qld/Vic. I'll talk to them later this week about what sort of protein levels they could produce, I guess ideally one around 30% and another around 40-50% to cover a range of fish, and I'll have to find out if both floating and sinking pellets will be available.

Let me know if you have any specific requirements, and I'll run it past them when I speak to them.

I'd be interested, depending upon price as always ahaha


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Well, including delivery, I'm getting 40% protein feed from Ideal Fish Food for about $7 per kg (from memory it's around $5 per kg without delivery).

The organic tag doesn't worry me that much, but I'd happily spend less on feed.

Isn't fish food tricky to make? I thought it needed fish meal and that sort of stuff in it?

If it matches the quality of Skretting Id be interested. I too am not fussed on the organic tag but more inclined to support local business.

We've found their chook and livestock feeds to be of good quality, so I would think they would produce decent fish food as well.

I'll be talking to them tomorrow or early next week, so I should be able to find out more details of what they can do, ingredients and pricing etc.

i've tried several food types with my koi and gold fishes and i did not feel any difference in it,
i currently feed them with pellates that come in a bag of 20Kg for about 50$. i know that some of the commercial koi growers here in israel use it as well, so what is good for them is more then good to me, this way i feed them on a daily basis (and i have about 20 big (15-30 cm) koi fish and dozens of little gold fishes, among other types)

I voted without thinking about the pound-to-kg conversion. I recently ordered a 10lb box of organic feed from "AquaOrganic", purchased on amazon for $40 / free shipping. I thought I was getting a good deal but when I do the conversion, that comes to over $8/kg.

For what it's worth, my catfish don't want to eat this stuff. it's apparently made from only vegetarian protein sources and I think it doesn't smell as strongly to the catfish so they aren't as interested. I was using Purina AquaMax 500 at first, and throwing that in the tank would cause a feeding frenzy.

Fish nutrition is a completely different ball game. I've got a contact in Queensland that was confident that they could do it but from memory they needed an order of 20t to make it worth while.

Do these guys have the expertise to make a product of comparable quality to Skrettings? Do they even know what should and shouldn't be in fish food for the different species?

This lot need a big order too, I think they said 8 tons, but with the lack of sufficient interest here, I have not followed it up with them yet.

They do all sorts of other livestock feeds, so I don't imagine fish would be too hard. We have to order another pallet of various feeds this week, so might ask for more info then.

"too hard" is kind of a subjective. Its not too hard for me to do the calculations for friction losses in pipes but others say that they are not up to it.

What I can say is that it is way more harder to formulate a fish food than it is a mammalian or avian feed.

What I can say is that it is way more harder to formulate a fish food than it is a mammalian or avian feed.

Why is that Stuart?


Also, how do you guys "capture" a text and make it stand out when copying/pasting from a previous post?

Use the quote button

Based on my early research into producing our own fish food.

In the early days I wanted to produce food for our systems ourselves and I didn't think it would be that hard because I'd made up food for other live stock before and new people that had done some pretty fancy stuff with supplemental dairy foods.

The more I looked into it the more I found how much harder it was. Getting the amino acid balance right, the energy balance and composition right and in the end getting them to eat it.



If you want to quote a post there is the "quote" button on the bottom right corner of each post and when you are writing a reply you can also select text in the previous comments section below and press the quote button.

.. @CC
Don't you just hit the QUOTE button, and then delete the irrelevant text ..
Or you can block the text, copy and then past between the QUOTE brackets
(But the latter doesn't work that well on my tablet)

And I do hate to see long posts quoted, ... people can read

@Guna.. I would be interested.. but not ATM.. as I have a deal of food to get through..
..
.

Organic is an often misused tag.. environmentally responsible, is of interest to me as I hate the thought of Asian product, made from sucking all life out of coastal waters....

I understand that Skretting food is produced responsibly..
.