Article and photos by William Kelly
I
n my first article we crunched a
few numbers about fish farming.
In summary my basis of approach is that aquaculture must be
financially viable to succeed. Up
until now it has not been (or we
would have an actual industry
about which I would be writing
instead) but the advent of the legalisation of niloticus has helped to
change all that. We concluded that
a 30 ton per year fish farm would
cost around R1.2M in infrastructure
and around R500k to R600k to run
it until one is in production. These
are of course just rough numbers
and they can and will be tweaked
depending on the farmer.
We also said nett profitability varied
from between R330k and R600k per
annum.
It certainly looks attractive - R600k
for an initial R1.8M outlay is not
too bad. But there is more to it
Simple DIY Tunnel - gets the job
done
than may first meet the eye.
Firstly your initial capital outlay
does not allow for the purchase of
land. The upside that your under
cover tunnel area required is only
around 1000 m2. Note that this can
be improved by quite a bit once you
are comfortable with what it is that
you are doing. It's not an onerous
quantity of land in other words and
for most wanting to get involved in
aquaculture the land availability is
often the least of the issues.
Leaving the land issue aside we get
rapidly onto what lies hidden in the
dark until you actually start-up your
own operations. These are the
many trials and tribulations which
business people quantify somewhat
superficially into a single word:
Risk.
Risk from a grey suited banker’s
perspective is just another word for
an unexpected expense. It sounds
mundane but really there are quite
Good algae growth on pipes a
sign systems are mature
a few people with bankrupted operations who failed to take cognisance of it! It's worth taking a brief
look at some of these 'risks'.
Scaling up to full production in fish
farming is not an overnight exercise. It takes months at best and
sometimes upwards of two full
years. Less than target production
means you still have most of the
expenses that you still have to cover, but without the production income. This can get quite annoying
quite quickly.
The full effect is muted a little because your feed running costs are
going to be less with fewer fishy
mouths to feed (feed can be up to
60% of your production costs). But
the point irrespective that you have
to keep uppermost in your mind is
that you can't be properly profitable
at less than maximum production
rates.
So we have the risk associated with
Makeup water storage for tunnel