One of the complaints about tilapia is that they are low in Omega-3’s. I had assumed this was due to their diet. Most aquaculture and even most aquaponics systems feed their fish corn and soybean based fish foods. Yuck! This means GMO fish food. There are organic feeds on the market, but even most of those still use corn and soy. Cows shouldn’t eat corn and soy, neither should pigs, surely corn is not a naturally occurring food for fish! Omnivorous fish will eat commercial food if trained to, not that this makes it good for them or those who in turn eat the fish. Fish can be fed flax seed as part of their diet which increases their Omega 3’s. Fish can process and absorb more of the flax seed than we can. We can absorb more of the benefits after it has become part of the fish than taking flax seed on its own. Fish food can be made of; black soldier fly grubs, duckweed, water hyacinth, water lettuce, worms, and even worm castings! Flax seed, wheat grass, smaller fish, snails and bugs can also be utilized. Food scraps can also be fed to some fish after being dehydrated. Algae can be grown or scraped off tank sides and then combined with other ingredients after being dehydrated to for super food! There are many opportunities to close the loop further growing the fish feed yourself rather than using cheap commercial food while at the same time increasing the health of your fish and producing higher quality food.
I was wondering how you would feed the flax to the fish? I am assuming that since they can process the flax better, that we would not have to crack the hulls of the seeds? I have been attempting to perfect sprouting the flax in order to feed it to the tilapia, but flax sprouting is very time intensive.
Ground flax would just make the water cloudy….or i would imagine so..
I would ground the flax and combine it with other things like the dehydrated water lettuce or duckweed. Making fish “cakes”
Yea, I’m going to start growing live food for my fish and see how that goes.
Yea, I’m going to start growing live food for my fish and see how that goes.
I love the idea of a black solider fly larvarium in the organic farmhouse… you could feed it with roadkill from the parkway!!
Flax seed is not even close to miracle that most people think.
True is better than soy or corn. The Omega-3 in flax meal is different than the oils from seaweed and fish.
The only true healthy and sustainable source of Omega-3 is not even fish, but Seaweed and Algae.
If there was a concentrated effort to grow seaweed, many of the pollution problems plague coastal communities globally.
The beauty of Seaweed is that it can serve not only as direct food for humans, but as feed for chickens and beef and chickens. The seaweed feed can be concentrated using Black Soldier flies.
Also Seaweed would serve as foundation technology for growing shell fish, abalone, which require no fertilizer , only physical work and strings holding the Seaweed in place.
This is the only true and sustainable source of food, that should be encouraged and demanded.
SAILINGTO claimed: “This is the only true and sustainable source of food, that should be encouraged and demanded.”
Seriously!? Certainly there are other ‘true’ sources of food as well. (Let’s not worship the seaweed, ok?)