Honduras Tilapia Treatment Plan

 

Proposal for Honduras Tilapia Farm where they have water flow through grow-out lagoons in series:

Firstly: Several Ponds for hatching fish, cycle time is between 30 - 40 days with a mortality rate around 10%, for their goal it is fine.

Second Phase: Nursery ponds for small fish weighting 1 - 60 g. This Phase runs between 70 - 80 days. Each pond is around 0.6 ha and they have 35 of them. Here they is a circulate the water at about 10% each day, and they do not have any problem with BOD / COD and sludge is minimal.

Third Phase: Pre-Finishing Ponds, where they grow from 60 to 200 grams in size.  These ponds are 500 m2 and circulate water at a rate of 300 % per day. The Tilapia density it is180 per m3 and there is no problem with BOD AND COD, but the mortality rate is 10 - 15%. They would like to reduce this to less than 5%, but with the water run so fast there is very little no retention time.

Fourth Phase: Finishing Ponds for Tilapia are conducted in two types of systems:

System One is called Agua Clara(clear water) and System Two is called Agua Verde (green water).  There are 54 ponds, each approximately one hain size with a depth1.2 meters, for a water volume of 120,000 m3. The circulation of water is around 5 - 20 % a day and the density of tilapia is very low.

We believe that there is an opportunity in this last phase to increase the Finishing Weight, and would like to conduct a test to try getting better productivity in this phase.  We recommend a trial be conducted where we apply ACF-32 to 3 ponds and set aside 3 more as control ponds. If our product succeeds in the grow out phase, increasing the average weight by some factor,we would be talking about 12,000 tilapias per pond x 54 ponds, or some 648,000tilapias per cycle.

If the selling is $2.50 per pound, a 3 ounce increase would amount to some $300,000 additional profits per cycle…or $5,555.00 per pond.

The issue is that these ponds are large, at 120,000 m3, and would require the following treatment dosage:

Per 120,000 m3 Pond

First Week                 120 Gallons

Weeks2-3-4                60 Gallons

Maintenance               10 Gallons per week

If you use the same water, and therefore can continue future cycles with only the first inoculation, your future cost would be based on 40Gallons per Pond per Month.