Batavia Coast Aquaponics

gtkmarine

Gday all

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Yesterday I harvested 6 of the Rainbow Trout that I added to my system back in May this year. The average weight was just under 600g, the longest being 34cm to a runt of 28cm. I still have 10 more in the system & it will be interesting to see the food conversion rate when they are all harvested, as I have kept good records of how much they have fed.

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No prize for guessing what tonight's dinner was !

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They taste good & made an excellent all home grown meal.

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The reason I harvested the Trout was to make room for 50 Barra fingerlings. Hopefully these we go better than the last lot of Barra that I tried. Ill have to work out some kind of heating system to over winter the though as the winter water temps get far too low for them to survive here.

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Well this is just a start of a new thread & Ill post more soon.
:wave:

GTK

gtkmarine

Where's the Batavia Coast ? :don't know:
A bit of history for those of you that don't know.
The Batavia coast is in the mid west of Western Australia adjacent to the Houtman Abrolhas Islands, which is famous in Dutch & Australian history for the ship wreck in 1629 of the Dutch East India Company ship the Batavia. The story of the massacre & struggle of ship wreck survivors has been well documented .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batavia_(ship)
http://www.abc.net.au/backyard/shipwrec ... atavia.htm
The book Island of the Angry Ghost is a great read & insight into the lives of those ship wreck survivors.
So if there is any one interested in AP here in Geraldton or on the Batavia Coast say Gday ! Ill be glad to hear from you.
GTK :wave1:

Bender

Nice harvest GTK. Well done

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

gtkmarine

Thanks Bender
Not bad for the first attempt with trout.
I'm very impressed with there growth over the past 6 months. I plan on putting a larger quantity into the main tank next year.

gtkmarine

Well I had some spare time this week, so I worked on my computing skills & put together a build thread using a movie maker program. Three years in the making !

https://youtu.be/Zt3Qi-NVF3E

:wave1:

GTK

scotty435

Enjoyed the video - looks like the system kept growing each year :thumbright:

gtkmarine

Thanks scotty435
The system is a bit of a mish mash in design as I just added on to it as components became available. But its working & producing well.
:wave1:

GTK

gtkmarine

Now that I have a fairly established AP system, I'm looking to cut down feeding costs for my Silver Perch by supplementing food from other sources. Things I have tried are: attracting insects to the FT with a bug light, catching wild foods, growing worms for them & making my own food.
So I make my own fish food by blending together a recipe of wild caught fish, prawn heads & vegetables. These ingredients are mixed with gelatine then set in trays, cut into blocks & frozen for storage.

https://youtu.be/ma_H-W7Ljqk

Ill look in the future to refine this feed method to make it more of a pellet/mince mix, by using a mincer/sausage machine & changing/adjusting the recipe hopefully it will improve the amount of food lost to the water when the fish attack it. But as you can see in the video the silver perch do enjoy the mix.

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I have productive worm farm, that I feed to the Perch when the worm numbers are sufficient to do so. Along with the worm farm there is a number of compost heaps that grubs are collected from when the heaps are turned. As well as all the caterpillars & grasshoppers that I get from the garden. Live wild caught Gambisia are also occasionally fed to them, the problem with these is that they may be carrying diseases that could possibly transferred the Siler Perch.

Attracting moths & mozzies at night using bug zapper has a power cost to involved to it, as it is 240v zapper & so far has not produced much in the way of food for the fish, this may just be a seasonal thing , maybe more night time insects in summer ? So the jury is out on it's effectiveness. I'm still working on the solar (PV) system & may try to get a 12-24v bug zapper going ?

I have been looking into (BSFL) Black Soldier fly larvae, they seem to produce large quantity's of food for fish & turn large amounts of food waste into compost. I have made a BSFL farm in an attempt to attract them but with no luck.
After 15 years of living here on this coast I can honestly say that I have never seen a BSF in any of the various compost heaps or worm farms, so I was thinking that I would have to import some BSFL in to get a colony established. Looking on the internet I found these guys selling BSFL but they are out of stock.
http://shop.blacksoldierflyfarming.com/
Dose anyone know were I can get some here in WA ?
:wave1:

gtkmarine

Had some spare time on the weekend so I knocked up some styro grow beds ( wicking type beds, kind of ) a simple PVC elbow from the bottom of the box to the overflow, which about @ 2" below the top of the media in the box. They are cheep & work well, I use water from the bio filter to top them up.

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These grow bed are ideal for plants with roots that clog up the AP grow beds like Celery as its easy to remove all of the media when the plants are finished.

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gorotsuki69

nice looking trout there.

Use mesh fly traps to collect bugs that is power-free. They work really well and dirt cheap also. Around $4 at Reject Shop. They will also catch cockroaches of which Geraldton has a limitless supply. :thumbright:

gtkmarine

Hey gorotsuki69
I like the look of those traps, very interesting. I have never see them before.
Ok Ill look into the Reject shop.
Thanks

gtkmarine

Gday
Not such a good Friday 13 for me. :upset:

With the over night Temp 24*c & todays max of 41*c here in Geraldton, I got home this afternoon to find 4 dead trout & 2 near dead in the bottom of the IBC.

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With the water temp @ 29*c I was not surprised. What did surprise me was that 4 trout survived. But the forecast temps for tomorrow is 22*c - 36*c so I don't think they will last too long. :think:

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The biggest weighed 659g - 35cm & the smallest 364g - 29cm.
Anyway the up side of the higher water temps mean that the Barra have started to feed well, they are almost coming to the surface to feed on the sinking pellets that I was given to feed them when I picked them up.
:wave1:

gtkmarine

Another 41*c day today the rest of the trout didn't stand a chance. 0930 & I put them out of their misery.

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The biggest 619g
That makes a total of 9.03Kg for 20 trout
total feed of 15.8 Kg
Food ~ weight conversion rate of 1 ~ 0.57
Impressive :notworthy:

joblow

Sorry to see the loses, the guys you did get to harvested were great fish.

It's very hard when you suddenly get very hot days and can't be there to try and turn things around.

skeggley

Hiya gtk, always nice when you get to choose the harvest day. Were you still feeding the fish in the days leading up to the deaths? I also thought the feed conversion rate for trout was higher up around 1:1 even. Doesn't help when the fish keep feeding the dog by splashing it out all the time though.
But well done getting the fish past the 500 mark anyway.

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