Week 4 - Fertiliser Investigations

This whole week has been very interesting indeed! With an appropriate supplementary feed established, I need to look into options for fertilising the ponds. Using fertiliser, inorganic or organic, helps improve the productivity of natural feed within the pond. Tilapia can grow reasonably large just on natural feed, so its important to source a good supply.On the farm we have some ducks, unfortunately their numbers are too low to have any significant impact on the ponds, but they do enjoy their daily swim and that will help a little.

Liwonde National Park is known for having a strong elephant population, and so I spent the earlier part of this week establishing links with park rangers for the collection of elephant dung. Midweek I received a call that they have round up a tonne of the dung, and it was ready for collection. Me and a local worker set off on the motorbike in to the park to investigate the work, it was impressive. We were happy to collect and arranged a truck to pick it up.

Of course, nothing is for free, and even elephant dung has a price. Negotiating with the rangers took time, especially as they had been drinking previously, but in the end we worked it out and payed an amount both parties were happy about. The truck came in to the park and we loaded the manure up by hand! You know you've made it when you're shovelling elephnat dung in to the back of a van somewhere in the middle of Africa! Best job ever!

Back at the farm, we put the manure in to a specially dug area, and will begin applying it to the ponds in the coming days. A week full of new experiences, all absolutely amazing!!

 

Shovelling Shit

Negotiations for the Manure