Aqua what ?
Aquaculture is the farming of fish and other aquatic animals (including pearls) and plants using inland waterways, lakes or ponds. It provides food for expanding populations without reducing wild fish stocks but it needs to be managed carefully to limit pollution from chemicals and waste.
Introduction
World Vision and the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) have shared their knowledge to establish individual and community fish farms to improve food security and provide income through the sales of extra fish and fish-feed.
Where is the fish project underway?
Since 2001, a fish farming and low-cost fish-feed program has been operating in two provinces, Surin and Udon Thani in North East Thailand.
People living here are dependent on agriculture and are limited in what food they can produce to feed themselves or sell. Low rainfall, poor soils and small landholdings limit production and, with no access to forests to supplement food shortages, people have a sparse and limited diet. Most land is used to grow rice, with little available for raising livestock. This results in low protein levels in people's diets.
Why fish?
Fish meat is an excellent source of energy and protein, is easily digested and has low fat content and high nutritional value. Buying fish from markets is usually out of the question for poor families. Wild fish can only be caught occur during the wet season, when rice paddies flood from nearby streams. Sometimes fish are kept in ponds near homes but they are only fed occasionally or not at all because commercial fish-feed is expensive.
Recently there has been another reason why fish have become important in Asia . Previously, poor families could keep chickens or ducks to help improve their situation but then came outbreaks of Avian (bird) flu. For a lot of farmers, it is too risky to invest in chickens, and fish have become a much safer option.
Tilapia and catfish have been introduced and bred because of their monetary value, menu versatility and firm, white good eating flesh.
Some of the tilapia raised in the Thai fish farming project.
Photo source: World Vision
Project overview
To date, over five hundred Thai farmers have been trained in
- fish raising
- fish-feed production and
- product processing
A healthy fifty percent of the farmers taking part are women, providing income for themselves and their families. This reduces their dependence on others and builds self-esteem and self-worth.
Training centres in the community are places where villagers learn from the project team and then in turn train others. They learn to identify the right pond locations, how to dig and prepare ponds, how to select fish breeds and fish raising itself. In other programs, they learn how to produce and store the fish-feed. The training centres operate as cooperatives, selling fish-feed and fingerlings more cheaply than commercial manufacturers.
Fish raising
Villagers farm fish in small in dug-out, plastic-lined ponds or cement pipes using appropriate, low-cost production methods. The young fish fingerlings are raised inside floating baskets covered with thin sheets for protection, and fed nutritious egg yolks to increase their chances of survival. The growing fish are then transferred to the earth ponds and fed using locally produced fish feed.
Young fish are raised in floating baskets. Vegetables are planted around the ponds adding to food availability.
Photo source: World Vision
The project takes care to minimise the chances of fish escaping to the wild. As the fish are not native to the area, they could potentially out-compete native species and greatly reduce the natural aquatic vegetation. There is also a risk that diseases could be introduced. For most farmers under the project this is not a problem as most household ponds are distant from natural water bodies. However, for larger village ponds this issue needs to be considered.
Fish-feed production
Fish need to be fed the correct amount regularly in order to survive and grow. Too much feed, or feeding after fish stop growing, is a waste of money. Commercial fish-feed is expensive so the project introduced communities to experimenting with producing their own high-quality, low-cost, fish-feed.
Fish-feed recipe
- crushed fish
- soy starch
- sugar starch
- fine bran
- free-mixer and corn
*Source cheaper local-produced ingredients such as bran, potato and rice to replace more costly crushed corn and soy starch.
- Determine percentage of protein for each mix. Choose from 18%, 30% or 35% protein for different age groups of fish.
- Mince and mix local ingredients with simple electric machinery.
- Make into pellets using an exact measure of water.
- Sun-dry pellets before storing to prevent mould.
In Prasat district, Surin province, a solar feed-drying facility has been built so that feed can continue to be produced during the rainy season.
Outcomes
- World Vision estimates that families can earn an extra 15,760 baht (A$600) annually if they raise 800 fish four times a year. Most families also keep fish for their own food, boosting their health as well as their finances.
- Some families also now plant crops such as chillies, ginger, lemongrass, mangoes and coconut around their ponds, further increasing their food supply and income.
- Development of a training curriculum for fish-farming in the Thai language.
- Development of a fish-farming fund (micro-credit scheme) in the project areas so that farmers can borrow small amounts of money to establish fish ponds.
- Development of fish-processing training, for value-added fish products such as sausages, sauces and traditional fermented products.
- Villages have been taught about the importance of ‘learning-action cycles'.
The next stage
Ongoing development in the communities
By being taught to find their own solutions, communities own the outcomes and so the project has a greater chance of continuing long after World Vision and ACIAR have left the area. This process also helps teach communities how to solve problems so that similar principles can be applied to other situations. Villagers are now:
- experimenting with new fish-feed recipes including peanut meal, soybean meal, poultry-offal meal, rice bran, broken rice, cassava and kapok-seed meal;
- investigating whether other pest species can be also used in fish-feed (an interesting development was that the cherry snail, a pest in rice crops, was used in some fish-feed recipes);
- experimenting to compare sinking and floating pellets (seeing the fish feeding from floating pellets reassures farmers that fish are alive and well).
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