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Fish project experiences huge resurgence

Home National Fish project experiences huge resurgence

The Editor of New Era newspaper Chrispin Inambao on Saturday interviewed Paulus Iita, the manager of Echo Fish Farm at the aquaculture project at Hardap on the outskirts of Mariental on how the project was founded and on issues related to fish farming.
Below are excerpts from the interview conducted at the aquaculture project

NE: Briefly tell us about your training prior to your employment as the manager of Echo Fish Farm?

PI: “I graduated this year with a degree in agriculture management which is basically a four-year degree course. Overall it is the management of agricultural enterprises including aquaculture. I grew up here, I went to school at Mariental High School from 2005 to 2009. After matriculation I enrolled at the Polytechnic of Namibia (PoN) in 2010 until this year when I obtained a Bachelor in Agriculture Management. Before I came here I worked as an assistant project coordinator at Namibia Nature Foundation (NNF).”

NE: When was the Echo Fish Farm started? And what are its founding objectives and who has a stake in Echo Fish Farm?

PI: “Initially the Hardap Fresh Water Institute was built for experimental farming with the idea to farm trout. This went on for several years without success because the winter temperatures are too cold for trout and the fish die during the colder months. Eighteen years ago the government took a decision to bring in private partners in the business. At that stage the (defunct) Catfish company was established. For catfish there hasn’t been a sustainable market, according to available history, with the over-supply of catfish from the Hardap dam. The Catfish company did a lot of expensive experiments with fish experts to determine a fish species suitable to the farm. At last with the assistance of the Philippine experts tilapia was imported from the USA. On May 23rd 1996 the Catfish company’s name was changed to Echo Fish Farm. At this very moment our main line of breeding is tilapia. The main objective is to make the fish farm sustainable to provide a market with a demand for eatable fish within the mainland of Namibia. Our vision is to be the leading fish farm in Namibia and at this very moment we believe we are and our mission is to have a complete breeding cycle where we have marketable fish throughout the year.”
NE: How many production ponds does this fish project have?

PI: “We are an intensive aquaculture farm with an intensive system. The breeding section consists of 18 square cement tanks which is in this order: three by three by one metre with 25 female and six males in each pond during the breeding period. Eggs are removed every ten days and placed into an incubator or rather hatchery room. This is where the sex reversal takes place.”

NE: What is sex reversal, put the terminology in layman’s language.

PI: “We change the sex of the fish from female to male. We want to have males because male fish grow faster and they get quite big compared to the female fish. The problem with the females is they can start breeding from any size from an early stage, which is what we would want to prevent – we want to produce males because we are strictly in a business.
“The hatchery consists of 24 circular fibre glass tanks that are each 1.5 cubic metres (1 500 litres) of water. After hatching in the incubator more or less after five days the fries (small fish) are placed in these tanks and now they are fed with this sex reversal hormones feed which is hormones mixed with feed. From six weeks after this period the small fish are moved to the nursery ponds. In the nursery we have four sections. We have the nursery plants with 18 rectangular ponds. All in all we have the breeding tunnel (eggs), the hatchery for fries pr small fish. When the eggs hatch from the hatchery they will still be five grams. In the nursery ponds the fish stay more or less for another three months before we move them to the grow-out ponds. We try to sell the fish from at least 500 grams to 800 grams. It will take a year for one fish to reach a kilogram – different people have different preferences. And we try to cater for all our customers. Restaurants prefer small fish of 300 to 400 grams because if you order that fish you won’t finish it – a kilo is too big for one person.”

NE: How big are these production ponds? In other words how many cubic metres or litres of water do they contain?

PI: “There are 12 circular cement grow-out ponds with an area of 28 square metres and we have five circular cement ponds with a surface area of 112 square metres and two rectangular ponds – one with an area of 336 square metres with a capacity of 15 000 to 20 000 fish while the other one is 720 square metres that has a capacity of between 30 000 to 40 000 of marketable fish.”

NE: How frequently does Echo Fish Farm harvest its fish for the market?

PI: “We try to harvest at least each and every second month, but the problem is this was not viable because there was not enough market for our fish. But now the demand has become higher and it exceeded our supply. Initially when I got here there was always fish, and fish was just lying here without customers. But after we started marketing we overcame this problem. We stopped with the harvesting just to fill up the gap that was created and now the people flock for our fish. In general people are aware of Echo Fish Farm and we now have a lot of customers. Most of our customers are from Windhoek but we also get customers from Oranjemund. Most of our customers own restaurants but we also provide to Just Fish and Sea Works – both sell a lot of fish.”

NE: How many people are employed at Echo Fish Farm and in which capacities are they employed?

PI: “We have nine labourers, and including myself together we are ten. I serve as the manager and I have a foreman and nightshift and dayshift securities.”

NE: What are the challenges in this particular type of business and how do you overcome these arising challenges?

PI: “Marketing was a very big challenge. We started to sell our fish to Just Fish and to Sea Works. We also have a social Facebook page as a tool for advertising our project. The other thing is sometimes we used to transport the fish to Windhoek and sold to our customers. The other challenge that we faced is fish feed takes up between 40 to 50 percent of our running costs. We used to get our fish feed from Nutro Signs in South Africa and when they closed down in April this year that became a challenge. We have a local fish feed plant at Omahenene Onavivi Inland Aquaculture Centre that belongs to the Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources but we still used to import from Nutro Signs due to the quality level. One distinction is the fish feed that we used to import consisted of floating pellets and that was good for us as fish farmers but the pellets from Omahenene just sink, they do not float. But I believe the inredients are still of the same quality. The major challenge is Nutro Signs closed and our fish is used to pellets that float. We managed to get another South Africa supplier IVI products but this place is very far away in KwaZulu-Natal but the costs remains high compared to Nutro Signs and in order to overcome this challenge we now mix pellets from IVI and Omahenene in this way we conserve the pellets ….”