Experimental fish farm

I don’t recall whether I have mentioned this before but we run a small experimental fish farm in the yard adjacent our factory in Gordon’s Bay. We use this as a trial facility for any new equipment we are developing or testing.

We have an agricultural tunnel with a series of tanks running on recirculation. We are in an industrial area so we have some space limitations as well as limitations based on access to resources.

Perhaps our scarcest resource is water which we currently get from the normal Municipal water supply. Its expensive so we are pretty careful with the volumes we use. We also take water off the factory roof, collected via gutter in a large rotomoulded rain water tank.

As you can imagine the agricultural tunnel is pretty hot in summer and fairly chilly in winter. Unfortunately this is the Western Cape and we are affected by some fairly radical seasonal weather swings. Ambient air temps get to just short of 40 degs C in summer and we get snow on the mountains in the background in winter. So this has forced us to vary our culture species with the seasons. Summer sees tilapia (we have both red and normal Mozambique strains) in the system and winter sees trout.