COMMERCIAL DEMONSTRATION IN FLOATING IN-POND RACEWAYS SYSTEM WITH RED TILAPIA, MISSION UPREACH, HONDURAS

Twenty, small raceways of 14.5 m³ each were placed on a 0.4225 Ha pond.  Of the 20 raceways, 12 were used in this experiment. Two commercial diets were evaluated using six replicates per treatment. Raceways fed diet A were stocked with 4200 fish each, with an individual average weight of 37.29 grams, and raceways fed diet B with 4224 fish per raceway, with an average weight of 39.40 grams per fish.  Fish were fed the first month with 38% CP followed by 32% CP for both diets, up to harvest. The fish reached the target market size in 117 days, Diet A registered an average 331.73 grams and diet B an average 358.44 grams, figure 1.   During the growing period, diet A yielded an average of 1245.86 kg/rw (85.8 kg/m³) and diet B an average of 1273.67 kg/rw (87.84 kg/m³).  The statistical analysis indicated that there is not a significant difference between the treatments, using the student test t-test (df = 10) = 1.41, P=0.09 (one tail).  During the growing period fish fed diet A observed a maximum growth of 5.61 g/day with an average of 2.51 g/day; and fish fed diet B a maximum growth of 5.96 g/day with an average of 2.72 g/day. Production parameters are presented in table 1. In terms of production per culture area, total average for both treatments was 1259.76 kg multiplied by the 20 raceways in the pond will yield 25,195.2 kg/crop, which translates to the industry standard of 59,633.6 kg/Ha/crop.  Two crops can easily can be obtained, yielding 119,267 kg/Ha/Year, table 1.  Economic analysis indicates that diet A gave a ROI% of 47 and diet B a ROI of 42.8%, table 2.