Thread: My farm used for final project

Originally Posted by Dalton

^ It can be done on small scale, I did that with a pilot-project back in 2006, it was 6 tanks, a settlement tank, bio-filter and air-pump. The whole construction price with pumps and all was 130.000 baht.

How many tanks ect.. do you have now?

looking your pics i look forward to wisit your farm and hear your mening to my ideas in the past i have worked on building factories that make pellets to feed salmon and trout in norway maybe we can make some thing that works together

Originally Posted by jizzybloke

How many tanks ect.. do you have now?

At this point we have 57 tanks in operation, the expantion is going slowly due to lack of capital.

Originally Posted by Dalton

Originally Posted by jizzybloke

How many tanks ect.. do you have now?

At this point we have 57 tanks in operation, the expantion is going slowly due to lack of capital.

Dalton are you buying your fish stock as fingerlings or hatching your own?

Curious as to how many fish you have and the ages.

Bar Dog

^ At pressent time we buy the fish when they are 25-28 days old, just after the sex-reversal is done, then we put them in nursery ponds for about 2 month or until the fish reach 50-75grams, then they go into the tanks and stay there for about 4 month, ending up with a final weight around 600grams each.

^ these are Tilpea (spelling?) or do you sell a variety of fish?

I can get fingerlings from the government office near Doi Saket outside of Chiang Mai. If my partner buys then the price is less than one third for me because she is Thai. And that is the OFFICIAL price not just something made up by them.

We have the room and thought about just digging a dam and stocking it with catfish for our own use. I want to put a sala out in the middle and go fishing ah lah the infamous Edgewater Hotel in Seattle. Red Snapper anyone?

^ They are called Tilapia, and you can get them in black or red colour.

We sell only them at the moment, but we are testing Pengassius as well and later we will try wit sea-bass.

Originally Posted by Dalton

^ They are called Tilapia, and you can get them in black or red colour.

What colour do the customers prefer? Is there any other differences between the two coloured fish in terms of size, growth rates, health etc.

Originally Posted by Dalton

We sell only them at the moment, but we are testing Pengassius as well and later we will try wit sea-bass.

Will you need to do a new filtration system for the salt water? Will you use natural salt water ie from the sea or make your own?

Jumping back and please excuse me if you have already gone through this but you are Scandinavian? Did you do this there?

thanks and this is a really interesting thread please keep it going. I am learning a lot.

Originally Posted by bar dog

What colour do the customers prefer? Is there any other differences between the two coloured fish in terms of size, growth rates, health etc.

The black one is the easiest to grow, they are more resistant than the red, the fry of the red is more expensive than the black.

Originally Posted by bar dog

Will you need to do a new filtration system for the salt water? Will you use natural salt water ie from the sea or make your own?

The Sea-bass will be able to grow in fresh-water, we do have a certent level of salinity pressent at all time.

Originally Posted by bar dog

Jumping back and please excuse me if you have already gone through this but you are Scandinavian? Did you do this there?

Nope, my back-ground is piping engineer with speciallity in steel-mills and paper-mills. And yes I'm from Denmark.

Originally Posted by bar dog

thanks and this is a really interesting thread please keep it going. I am learning a lot.

My pleassure..

The rather cold weater now, has a big influence on our FCR, the fish has grown less than normal over the past one month, but eating the same amount of feed...

What about the students involved in the finals projects?

Any photo's?

^ Sure...I can post some of the boys...The girls I keep for myself

^ China is the biggest exporter of frozen Tilapia in the world.....They do have some health issues, and have been banned from the US market before, but they keep coming back in, cause there aint anybody who can supply the US market if China is out in the cold..

Just had a visit from the university, the teachers had there bosses from Bangkok on a group-tour









And they were all happy with the result...

Originally Posted by Dalton

The rather cold weater now, has a big influence on our FCR, the fish has grown less than normal over the past one month, but eating the same amount of feed...

been racking my brains trying to figure this out. surely the fcr should not drop if they are feeding the same amount of the same feed? they should get more lethargic in the colder weather, and since they cannot control body temperature, so this is not where the energy is going. are there no other factors possibly affecting them?
do you experience this every time there is a cold spell?
perhaps they were getting some extra nutrients in the form of phytoplankton or zooplankton that would be more plentiful in warmer weather?
my fish also grew slower during the cooler months, but they were feeding far less, so this is not the same as your situation.
any ideas, anybody?

Originally Posted by tsicar

any ideas, anybody?

Give it up and retire. See you at the airport.

Originally Posted by tsicar

Originally Posted by Dalton

The rather cold weater now, has a big influence on our FCR, the fish has grown less than normal over the past one month, but eating the same amount of feed...

been racking my brains trying to figure this out. surely the fcr should not drop if they are feeding the same amount of the same feed? they should get more lethargic in the colder weather, and since they cannot control body temperature, so this is not where the energy is going. are there no other factors possibly affecting them?
do you experience this every time there is a cold spell?
perhaps they were getting some extra nutrients in the form of phytoplankton or zooplankton that would be more plentiful in warmer weather?
my fish also grew slower during the cooler months, but they were feeding far less, so this is not the same as your situation.
any ideas, anybody?

I recommend a test tank, make a crude solar system by making a PVC grid of small pipes and painting them black put them somewhere they can get proper sun light and plumbing them into your return system.

Put a thermometer in the tank and monitor the temp for a few days and try to get a fix on a steady temp playing with the amount of water pumped to the system through valving and run time, shutting down the solar system at night because that has the opposite effect as during the day, then stock that tank and see what happens??

That will at least give a good starting point and if it increases growth than you could make a real system the same way for the rest of your tanks....

Originally Posted by Driventowin

I recommend a test tank, make a crude solar system by making a PVC grid of small pipes and painting them black put them somewhere they can get proper sun light and plumbing them into your return system.

We have been thinking about this, and the way the weather behaves, then it's posible that we will do a test, but we need to calculate very careful, if it really is worth it.

Originally Posted by tsicar

been racking my brains trying to figure this out. surely the fcr should not drop if they are feeding the same amount of the same feed? they should get more lethargic in the colder weather, and since they cannot control body temperature, so this is not where the energy is going. are there no other factors possibly affecting them? do you experience this every time there is a cold spell? perhaps they were getting some extra nutrients in the form of phytoplankton or zooplankton that would be more plentiful in warmer weather? my fish also grew slower during the cooler months, but they were feeding far less, so this is not the same as your situation. any ideas, anybody?

No plankton in recirculation systems, and even if, the fish would only eat them if I stopped feeding them pellets, and then the growth-rate would drop real quick.
The solutio is as DTW says to heat up the water somehow, solar power would be the choice in Europe, but here they cost a bloddy fortune.

Originally Posted by Dalton

The solutio is as DTW says to heat up the water somehow, solar power would be the choice in Europe, but here they cost a bloddy fortune.

With your ability to build your own, think several meters of black plastic tubing on the roof of your shed would add a fair amount of heat to the water.

Originally Posted by Norton

Originally Posted by Dalton

The solutio is as DTW says to heat up the water somehow, solar power would be the choice in Europe, but here they cost a bloddy fortune.

With your ability to build your own, think several meters of black plastic tubing on the roof of your shed would add a fair amount of heat to the water.

this does work well- i used black irrigation pipe to raise the temp of my swimming pool in south africa. you need a lot of it, tho. i just coiled it on the top of my garage roof and passed a percentage of the pumped water through it. the stuff is available cheap in thailand, but dalton would need a few kilometres of the stuff with the volume he needs to heat.
so perhaps heating the water would fix the problem, but why the temp. affects his fcr is still a mystery.

Originally Posted by tsicar

Originally Posted by Norton

Originally Posted by Dalton

The solutio is as DTW says to heat up the water somehow, solar power would be the choice in Europe, but here they cost a bloddy fortune.

With your ability to build your own, think several meters of black plastic tubing on the roof of your shed would add a fair amount of heat to the water.

this does work well- i used black irrigation pipe to raise the temp of my swimming pool in south africa. you need a lot of it, tho. i just coiled it on the top of my garage roof and passed a percentage of the pumped water through it. the stuff is available cheap in thailand, but dalton would need a few kilometres of the stuff with the volume he needs to heat.
so perhaps heating the water would fix the problem, but why the temp. affects his fcr is still a mystery.

Well I considered this but that type of plastic piping can have chemicals and toxins in it's processing that can leach into the water and harm your fish, especially under heating conditions so you have to be very careful about those types of materials..

You don't want to throw a new curve ball into the program by suddenly having sick fish and not being able to pin the cause. So since you have PVC pipe already and no ill effects currently being displayed it would be better to go with the current plan for your test so you have 'known' parameters with which to form your conclusions..

Get your final analysis first then do another test with a single tank again and see if there is any detrimental effect with the 'Poly Pipe' as we refer to it..

Originally Posted by tsicar

but why the temp. affects his fcr is still a mystery.

Well Tilapia has there best growth when the temp is around 28-30 C, when it gets down to 20 C then they aint very happy, the cooler water has an effect on the water parameters as well, so there are many factores to take in consideration.