Tilapia species are easy to feed and accept most food sources. They can thrive and reproduce in most foods, and they can grow without problems when they only have pelleted foods.
Suitable Food for Tilapias Includes
Pellets and cichlid sticks: Tilapia grows well with eating pellets, and the pellet food is a good basis for their diet. Try to use granules containing spirulina powder and other green vegetables.
Vegetables: It is good to provide some vegetables in their diet. Suitable vegetables include lettuce and peas. They also like to eat some aquatic plants, especially some floating plants.
Frozen food: Tilapias like frozen foods and can be eaten in large quantities. It can be expensive to buy frozen food at a fish store. However, you can find cheaper and more suitable frozen food in the supermarket. For example, frozen shrimps without shells can be bought in large packages, which are much cheaper than fish shops, and tilapia is also very good for feeding.
Fish Feed Extrusion and Production Process
According to the density change and the degree of puffing, puffed fish feed can be divided into floating fish feed and sunken fish feed. Floating feed is currently the most widely used extrusion feed in aquaculture, and the technology is relatively mature. That is, the floating extruded feed pellets are heated and prepared by the modulator. After the fish feed materials enter the extruder, they are continuously stirred, heated, pressurized, matured, extruded, and then expanded and granulated. Compared with floating fish feed, sinking pellets has different requirements for the contrast weight. Even if the same fish feed machine is used, the manufacturing process of fish feed has different requirements.
In short, the fish feed extrusion process requires a hammer mill to grind the raw materials, the mixer mixed raw materials include vitamin mineral premix and the wet fish feed extruder’s steam preconditioner and cutter head shape pellets, and finally dryer-cooler to ensure the shelf life and stability of the granules.
How to Reduce the Cost on Tilapia Feed?
As I mentioned before, raising tilapia is very expensive, and it will take several months before you can see the return on investment. In other words, you can do something to save your feed costs. If there are plants or algae in your lake, small fish can survive on them. When there are enough algae in the water, you can delay eating.
On our farm, we use duckweed. This is a potential tilapia feed worthy of attention, and its high protein content makes it a power plant. It does not provide all the nutrients needed for a balanced diet of tilapia, but it is ideal as a supplementary feed.
We feed duckweed tilapia every other day. Without pellet food, they can maintain their daily life, provide them with extra protein, and reduce our food bill by half! When you have thousands of fish, the money saved can mean the difference between a profitable business and a struggling business.
Prepared Tilapia Diets
Formulated feed for tilapia should contain between 27% and 40 % protein.
For fry and fingerlings, the feed should have small particles and a protein content of about 35%- 40%, while for adults the protein content could be between 27% and 30%.
Some farm-made feeds can have the following combinations.
Powdered Leucaena leaves………20%
Cooked maize……………………80%
Rice bran…………………………70%
Palm Kernel Cake…………………15%
Maize meal/Cassava Dough……… 15%
Tilapia, especially in the case of high-density farming, requires a high-quality, nutritious and balanced diet to grow quickly and stay healthy.
Tilapia Feeding Tips
Commercial tilapia feed is formulated, cooked, extruded and pelleted feed, and usually contains 32% to 40% protein. It can be fish meal or soy protein, the former is more delicious for fish. The issue of palatability is important, but it is often overlooked by nutritionists, feed manufacturers and fish farmers themselves.
It is generally recommended to use floating pellets because they will stay on the surface until they are consumed. However, they are more expensive. Pellets for sinking are easier to manufacture and therefore cheaper. But they may get lost in the mud at the bottom of the pond. However, in shallow artificial containers, this is not a problem, because fish can find fish balls sinking to the bottom of the pond.
In any circulating water system, the water cannot be fertilized as in earthen pond farming. This process is often misunderstood. The pond water is fertilized with animal manure to increase the natural productivity of food organisms.
Fish do not eat manure. On the contrary, it decomposes in the water, which increases the natural quantity of zooplankton and phytoplankton and provides rich food for fish. However, if you do this in a closed system, you will face the risk of oxygen depletion and ammonia concentration-in a closed recycling system, this is a potentially lethal combination.