Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Tom, pretty much!

notice how the mince meat on the right does tend to break off, but the one on the LEFT remains intact? that was the problme i was having and hence why i was thinking of putting the cutting blade on the outside..............

Is it still hard to break once you've dried the stuff, Steve?
The guys on the Indonesian website heated the grinder and the pellets are dried right out of the grinder (you can see the fan on the left picture).

i found they got quire brittle, i guess it would just be a matter of getting the right consistency....................i used flour to give mine thickness

Hard thread to come in on... lol
Umm.. sprouted wheat has been used for koi for a long time. vit A in the germ or something give you some health and colour benefits. Even just soaked 24 hours before ya feed helps
Earthworms are just working well for me with bullrouts. Just depends what the feeder eats and if it's a complete diet.
Alfalfa is a common ingredient in goldfish foods.
Flour usually used to hold flakes/pellet together or bulk a product up... it's usually in the first 3 ingredients in really cheap food.

Can make own fish food out of anything, fresh fish/prawns is great if ya have big freezer. I really try to get the 'meat' from seafood. blended up 'whitebait' is good as you get the guts and bones and all, more complete feed than fillets and they are small enuf to blend. For small scale its nice to use agar agar but ya gelatin for bigger batches. Squid is hard to blend but some times cheap to.
With crabs and shrimps the meat is good for growth but the shells are awesome for colour. If you have ornamentals try getting crab/lobby/prawn shell waste from somewhere and blending into a gel food. Colours up fish nice and natural.
Chicken guts maybe for catfish... our local tandanus would maybe go, dunno if you have maybe a forked tail that would work. You would want the fish to eat every last bit as it could make the water nasty as. Even beef heart polutes the water badly. Eggs are another good food but polute badly.
Spirulina, duckweed, earthworms... all have really good digestability. Ground fish gives good growth, and crustaceans with lots of shells give good colour. Peas and duckweed keep them pooping....

Tim B! nothing worng with doing that at all! fiddly to blend and ya need to bulk it out really. I used a magic bullet first few goes which was frustrating as small batches. But ya works tops, great minds think alike mate! altho i stole the idea from a nasa duckweed and grass carp aquarium design thought up to give space men fish and duckweed juice drinks and turn the fibre from making the juice into the food pellet for the fish. Blending the duckweed makes it a lot easier for the fish to digest and lets smaller fish eat it easily. Drying it out in small chunks makes it easy to store. Juice would work very well with geletin and frozen as a gel food, I have been wasting it on my batches altho I did use it to start an greenwater culture (water from steaming veggies was another winner) recently.
I have heard of goldfish breeders throwing dead chickens onto the protective wire over their ponds when they go on vacation. The chooks get attacked by flies and the maggots fall into the ponds and feed the fish.... can't smell too good, dunno if neighbour would be thrilled about coming over to feed the cat.... but maybe if ya left out enuf chooks you wouldn't have to. heh


Mosquito larvae don't take oxygen from water making them as negative impact as duckweed to use as feeders. The wrigglers can be bred enmass in a barrel of water with a bit of veggie waste thrown in... but dammit mosquito are just b@$tards and I don't feel clean suggesting them. They do work great for tetra, rainbows, whiteclouds and blue eyes tho. Trigger spawning in betta and paradise fish too.

gut contents can I agree be very misleading... a bit of algae may be covered in all sorts of little micro critters and algaes and worms and snails! Sure the fish may eat algae but it may get it's nutrition from digesting things living on the algae.

Pumpkin seeds have been used as a wormer for discus fish. Funny one have a google hey.

I live with a african cichlid breeder who breeds/feeds mealworms. I have have had woodys going before, found them very trouble free once setup., no mess, no fuss, no smell... ran for ages on a bag of guinea pig food and odd veggie.
Pellets are difficult to make but I have documents somewhere that are designed for small fish raising farms to make their own pellets. Another technique is to make flake style foods. A liquid recipe is poured over a heated metal roller and drys as a thin sheet and falls off. Flakes are not as good as pellets IMHO... flakes have their nutrients soaked out quicker in water, don't last as long in storage and are harder to accurately feed. But they could be an option.
Something I have always wanted to do on a larger scale is garden snails. I bred them in a green house thing once on organic veggie scraps as feeders for some octopus and they seemed to work quite well. Not sure on exact makeup but if theres no chemicals around I often crack the shell and throw them to koi... tasty treats.

want a bit of a laugh see my thread where i made fish food...........missus wasn't happy. from memory it consisted of about 20 silver perch, (boiled and put thru the mincer whole) assorted veggies, flour, lemon juice....... fish loved it............. mental note, next time brew it all up outside

stop ya jaw flappin stevo n go eat ya dinner

LOL I got banished to the shed and my own freezer/blender/knives etc
wooot

som you gonna hook us up with a feeder fish breeding program? i'm stuck with convicts cause their easy, just add water

If you have an abn can prob just order a batch from a wholesaler like bayfish or aquatic industrys. What are you feeding the convicts too? I mean if you can keep convicts alive maybe try a cash crop like electric yellows? Or even a livebearer that you can sell as ornamental and as a feeder?

i meant more like step by step for breeding as feeder fish.


You're kidding? i found one in 2 inches of water in a water change bucket that was full of gravel and sitting in my computer room in the corner for atleast a week! they are indestructable!

i feed convicts what ever i have around, tropical flakes, goldie flakes, trout pellets, native pellets, hard boiled egg............. i'm on about the 5th generation from one set of parents

I recently had a time where I ran out of pellets and went looking for other food. The trout loved the diced beef heart and I found a cheep supplier at $2/kg. But I wanted to add something else hoping that they would get different vitimins/nutrients, without going too scientific. Got the wife's new blender and ground up some beef heart, then threw in some raw eggs (in plentiful home supply), finely shredded greens and carrot (but should have used the duckweed in the turtle pond), paprika (because I heard they like the red food) then poured in some gelatine to bind it all together. Pourd it into ice cube trays and into the freezer. Now I use it to suppliment the pellet diet by thawing out a couple of cubes, dicing them up roughly and throwing them in. Clean, easy fresh food, no need to mess around with pelletting and drying

wow, $2/kg, where where where?

I used to be able to get boxes of ox hearts for $1/Kg (years ago) from one of the abattoirs

where would one look for cheap stuff liek that?

i once asked my bosses brother (butcher) but he said that most things are now packaged up and sold as fresh dog food

just ring them up, that's what I did