Week 6 - Teaching the Basics

Its been good to get back to Chikolongo farm, I missed the community and my tent! This week has been all about training a few individuals on the basic prinicpals to tilapia farming.

There are three long term workers on the farm, Philip, Grishan and Lucy. Lucy belongs to the 24 families but Philip and Grishan are external workers. I felt it was important to teach them the areas thatwill be in the final manual, in order to improve their uptake of knowledge when they finally read the manual.

I have a D.O, pH and conductivity meter to test water quality, along with ammonina, nitrite and nitrate testing kits. Given that none of them have had any science lessons in their short school lives, they have been very receptive to the processes and understand why they are needed. Since my lessons they have been using the equipment confidently, so that when levels change within the ponds I'm confident that they know how to manage the changes correctly.

Towards the end of the week, we did some grading in the ponds. Remember, up to this point we still didn't know the numbers in any of the ponds apart from the one we harvested. I decided to grade the fish in to three ponds of different sizes. <25g, 25g - 65g and 65g +. Unfortunately the majority of the fish were under 65g and so we just stocked three ponds with two sizes.

It was a good lesson for myself and the community, we had limited equipment to carry out the grading and if I'm being honest it wasn't the most accurate. I think that it will be a good idea to run some feed trials and see what results if any we will get out of it.

Learning the correct SOP for feeding the fish

Lucy, weighing the fish feed

Grading some fingerlings