Last month we started selling the fish that we’ve grown to individual buyers who came to our office. It was exciting at first and we had a lot of people interested, but as the weeks have gone on, it has slowed down a bit. Still, we’ve sold about ¼ of our fish to people at about 2 or 3 at a time. The fish taste great and have a lot of good meat on them. All the ones we’ve sold have been at least 1 kg and some a little over 2 kgs (4-5 lbs) after 6-7 months of growth. We’ll see if we can continue to cut out the middle man and sell to individuals for the best price, or if we’ll have to sell the rest in bulk to a restaurant or supermarket for more immediate, but less profit.
We split the fish into two basins because of how many and how big they are. But we had bricks left over, and so decided to make a third basin that is thinner and longer. Now we’ve bought a new batch of fish, to make sure that we have some big ones to sell to our regular customers by the time we finish the first batch. We also tried a slightly different type of catfish that is supposed to get longer and so has even more meat.
We still have a long way to go to sell all, or even to get to break even, but it has gotten people talking a lot about the benefits of fish and farming together. We hope that we can save a few of our first batch to see how big they get in a year, and also use them to do some focused fish hatching. If we were successful at that, then we’d save a decent amount of money not having to buy future fish batches! The next stages are still to try this on a larger scale at one of the church’s schools to help it to further develop its facilities. And then also try it on a smaller scale as micro-business for pastors in different areas.
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-- El Padre
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