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Cake for fish? Hold the coconut, please November 6th, 2016 by

cake-for-fish-1A good farmer training video inspires farmers to modify practices, for example, replacing an ingredient of a locally-made animal feed. But when changing ingredients, one has to know a lot about them, as we learned recently while teaching a video production workshop in Tamil Nadu, southern India.

Explaining the principles behind a certain technology or why something is done in a particular way helps farmers to better understand the innovation and to try it out with whatever resources they have at hand. The different examples shown in a video help to give farmers more ideas to work with.

In Tamil Nadu, one group of trainees was making a video on home-made animal feed, which only costs half as much as concentrated feed that one can buy in a shop.

cake-for-fish-2By interacting with various farmers, the trainees learned quite a few things. While shops sell specific feed for different animals, farmers make a base mix of grains, pulses and oil-cakes that they use to feed all their animals and fish. This saves the farmers time, while allowing them to still tailor the feed for each species of livestock. Depending on whether it is for cattle, goats, poultry or fish they will then add some extra ingredients, like dried fish (if the feed is for fish or poultry).

The trainees also learned that when you want to use a base mix for fish, you need to consider a few things. Farmers rear up to 6 different species of fish. Two species are surface feeders, two feed in the middle layer, and two species are bottom feeders. As you want the feed to be eaten by all fish, the mix should be milled to a course flour. When ground too fine, the feed will float and be available to the surface feeders only.

One other thing the team of trainees learned was that for fish you can use groundnut oil cake or cotton seed oil cake, but you should never use coconut oil cake (which is readily available and cheap in coastal India). Why? Well, if coconut oil cake is used in the base mix, two days after feeding the fish, an oily film will develop, blocking the pond from sunlight and oxygen and slowly killing the fish. The household can still use coconout oil cake in base feeds intended for livestock.

Clearly, oil cakes are not all the same and not all are interchangeable.

Good farmer training videos should present a range of different options and locally available resources, but they should also warn farmers of any possible risks. Videos for farmers should always say why an option will (or won’t work), as in this case: don’t feed coconut to your fish or the oil will block their sunlight and kill them!

Related video

Preparing low-cost concentrate feed

To watch the video in French, click here.

To watch the video in Tamil, click here.

To watch the video in Bangla, click here.

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