Bringing Tilapia Home

After setting up our first set of "tilapia pools" which we now call every soft sided, inflatable, ringed pool we see, it was time to go get some fish.
 This fish endeavor was all new to us, so we took the recommendation of the representative in the Florida Dept of  Aquaculture and contacted a fish farmer in Micanopy, Florida which is about 4 hours from here. Supposedly this was the closest grower and he was terminating the tilapia side of his aquaculture business and had some fish to get rid of. One of the stipulations of being licensed and raising tilapia is that you must hold a business license and you must sell the fish commercially.

  My husband and two sons and I made the drive to Micanopy on a bright sunny day - that is, until we arrived - then it began to rain. We were taken to his ponds where he began to throw fish food to entice the tilapia to come close enough so that Bob could throw a cast net over them. Tilapia are not a sport fish. They are a fresh water cichlid - like an oscar in a fish aquarium - they don't take a hook so they can only be caught with a net.
The owner showed us how to sex the fish by looking at their vent, but he was not very convincing as to the exactness of this method.

This is what Blue Tilapia look like - these are very small fish - about 2/3 pound. Typically we grow them to about 4 or 5 pounds.

It didn't take long before we had 50 or so fish in 5 gallon buckets which we then transported to the back of the pickup where Bob had 30 gallon drums of water waiting with an intricate aeration system hooked up.

 We laugh about this now; back then we were afraid the fish would stress without oxygen for the 4 hour car ride back. Now we know that they are a tough fish and can literally gasp air from the surface if their tank lacks oxygen.
  On the drive back home we had to stop at the agricultural inspection station at the Suwannee River. We had all our paperwork and certification ready, thinking that we would be inspected, but the officer just looked at the card and waved us through because there is no restriction on tilapia at the Suwannee River - not until you travel further west to the St Marks River are they controlled.

 By the time we reached the farm it was dark and late. We had no outdoor lights except one security light on a power pole, and by that lamplight we began to sort the fish. We were specifically looking for several male fish to put into an aquarium in the house - male tilapia incubate fish eggs in their mouth and we wanted a few hundred new hatchlings to try an experiment we read about to sex all the babies into males by feeding them a percentage of testosterone in their first 30 days of feed. New hatchlings are neither male nor female. Many factors in the environment determine the percentage of males to females. The males grow more quickly and become a better food product in less time. The technique is to regulate the new hatchlings to all become male. So there we were, extremely tired, peering into fish mouths in the dark searching for eggs.

Several of the males with eggs went into the aquarium in the house while the rest of the fish were carried and released into the swimming pools.
 Unfortunately, the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. 
Some lived, some died, but eventually they all ended up in the outside swimming pools - males and females.
Thus began our tilapia experience.

Raising Tilapia - Our First Attempt

Yesterday we received news that the renewal of our license to raise tilapia fish has been denied.  We've been certified to raise these fish since 2005, and oh, has it been a learning experience!

It began years ago, while we planned and dreamed about one day owning land and working towards a more self sufficient lifestyle. We read an article in a Reader's Digest homestead skills book about raising tilapia in swimming pools. The article claimed that these African cichlids were a vegetarian species and could live on grass clippings. Now THAT was something we could afford! We were immediately hooked and planned that one day we would do this.

  Tilapia are a fresh water, African fish. They need warm waters to survive - above 45 degrees, and are a very prolific fish. They are becoming more and more popular as a recognized food source and as a fish farming choice. We wanted to raise tilapia as food for our family, but found, upon researching this topic, that because they are considered an "invasive species", because they multiply rapidly and are not indigenous to the US, there is a fear that they will disrupt the natural ecosystem, (we have our own thoughts about that!) so the state of Florida requires growers to be licensed and periodically inspected, even though Tilapia swim freely and are unregulated in the waters of Florida south of the St Mark's River - which is about 3 hours from here. This we did.

We closed on our property in the fall of 2003 and by the spring of 2005 this is what my husband had set up for our first attempt at fish farming.
Keep in mind we were only coming to the property on the weekends

 

 A hand-dug, in-ground  filtration system begins on the left. It is a closed system in which used fish water is pumped into the top of the filtration system (far left) and flows downhill, behind the swimming pools through a lava rock setup designed to capture the fish waste and clean the water. The water empties into a holding tank behind the farthest right hand swimming pool where it collects and is then pumped back into the three pools by means of a float valve and a swimming pool pump, thereby aerating with pools with naturally, cleaned fish water. Because the land here is pure sand, the entire structure is lined in plastic so that the water can be retained and not seep immediately into the ground. The water is cleaned by a combination of exposure to sunlight, plants, aerobic bacteria in the exposed water, and a septic tank feeder hose buried beneath a sand bed to harbor anaerobic bacteria which further breaks down the waste - similar to a septic tank. This combination of exposed sunlight and anaerobic action of sand filtered bacteria mixed together produce as natural a filtration system as can be put together by man. God does this in the natural ecosystem.

You'll see later modifications and revelations in future articles.

Now it was time to get the fish.