Visit of the Farm
Pumping area for broodstock and hatchery is not located at the best point and Mr. Delaune is claiming for a straight pumping at sea because he needs more quality water.
The production for 1988 was 16 metric tonnes (mt) with limiting factors like the lack of an aeration system (lack of easy repair on dikes; F$ 100,000 of cost of repairing levees last year). However, 1.8 mt per ha can be achieved with P. monodon and 2.6 mt per ha can be achieved with P. stylirostris. This is an estimation cost only.
Biological Data
The farm has some disease problems with soft shell P. monodon. The exoskeleton is not fully extended on the body. Broodstock is in scobalit tank with or without white sand. Fed on pelleted shrimp feed, clam, and fresh water mussel.
Need for:
Economy
For 6 mt production in 1981:
| - Feed | 38% |
| - Labour | 28% |
| - Energy | 15% |
| - Basic | 19% |
Feed conversion ratio was around 3 and a selling price of shrimp between F$ 12 and 13 per kg. Not included here is the cost of post-larvae.
Equipment and Facilities
Available equipment necessary for fresh water prawn feed processing at the Fresh-Water Aquaculture Research Station at Naduruloulou, are listed below:
Fish meal processing unit using a boiling system working with kerosene.
Can process about 100 kg of fresh fish at a time to produce 40 to 60 kg of fish meal (non defatted fish meal) within 4 to 6 hours at a very cheap cost (20 cents per kg). The product can be sieved to remove bones. Its quality is greatly fluctuating according to the kind of fish, freshness, etc. This is an artisanal way of preparing fish meal.
An oven or batch dryer to dry extruded feeds coming out from the meat mincer. Capacity: around 100 kg per 5 hours moisture contact should drop from 20 to 30% down to 12%. In fact, the idea to put trays in outside when it is sunny should be forgotten for quality reasons of the finished feed.
A small pin mill equipped with screens of 4 mm, 2 mm, and 1 mm but the last one cannot be operated due to high fat content in most selected ingredients (meat meal, fish meal, etc.). The capacity is limited because it is more or less a laboratory equipment.
A meat mincer given for 1 mt a day, equipped with a cutter which can produce high moisture noodle, shape feed. This apparatus is very suitable for preparing moist pellets every day. This is what is called an on-the-farm-equipment.
A ventilated drying chamber have been installed to allow a certain production of dry extruded feed. But it can load around 40 to 50 kg of material for a 4 hours cycle at 80 °C and that represents a highly limiting factor for an extension of the production of feeds through these equipments.
Additional equipment like a crumbling machine, a sieving machine (4 grades), a vertical 80 to 100 liters mixer, allow to prepare starter feeds in small quantities.
A small storage area for drying ingredients like wheat bran, copra meal, meat meal.
All these equipment are very well appropriated to make a daily preparation of a small quantity of feed which is distributed readily into the ponds. It is a very good example for solving a feeding problem on the farm, in case of developing aquaculture in rural conditions.
However, this is far from what is really needed for a commercial operation involving shrimp farming.
In case of intensive use of these equipment, a lot of modifications have to be made and particularly for mixing and drying operations, but also a new area should be allocated to let work be done more easily.
In fact, if such equipment should be used for producing at a pilot scale for example 40 mt a year, they should be moved in the existing factory to get the benefice of stocking area for raw materials and finished feed and to have a better availability of raw materials.
Necessary modifications and additions of equipment and facility would represent a relatively high investment including: (Figure 1)
FIGURE 1
Feed Production for Fresh-Water Prawn Farming
The production of feed for Macrobrachium could start readily at an experimental scale in Naduruloulou Station with the existing equipments.
A formulation for grower feed for Macrobrachium has been shown to people at the Station. There is no real difficulty to prepare such a feed, similar to the one which is produced in Tahiti.
More over, in Fiji the production of copra helps to make available on the market a quality product: copra meal grade A, which could be added in Macrobrachium formulation in order to have up to 20 to 30% of the formula, provided that the feed is :
and water stable thanks to a binder like “Stanguard” or some wheat flour. The price of such a feed should be very reasonable especially if copra is included in the formula.
Technical Discussion with the Factory Manager
They concentrate on poultry and stock feeds with a production of 280 to 300 mt per week flexibility up to 430 mt a week temporarily averaging 14 to 15,000 mt production yearly.
This company is covered at 50% by New Zealand counterpart N.R.M. feeds and a couple of years ago they tried some batches of shrimps feed but without success due to poor grinding, inappropriate binder and lack of know how in the matter of pellet mill run for shrimp feed. In addition, the company was overcharged for regular terrestrial feed production.
At present, they have 3 pellet mills Simon Barron and can work on two shifts basis and even three shifts. So they could easily save a temporary 20% increase in their production in order to cope with a demand for shrimp feed for 60 up to 300 mt, if they get:
All these aspects could be covered up together with expertise already existing in South Pacific Region.
Equipments used at Crest Mills
Grinding with screens of 3m/m hammer mill should be improved.
Mixing 1.5 mt with heated molasses to be added; good equipment.
Pelleting Simon Barron 2+1 pellet mill one conditioner only. One speed. 5/32 inches holes in die (4m/mm); 70 °C at die entrance possible 80 °C no molasses on pellet mill.
Cooling bagging classical equipment.
Storage area with:
Mill mix - pollards plus bran
Meat bone meal from New Zealand
U.S. soya bean meal 47% CP
Pafco fish meal
Molasses, heated up 2% maxim inclusion
DL methionine
Lysine
Sodium bicarbonate
Maize
Sorghum.
These equipments should contribute to produce a feed for shrimp at around 90 cents per kg, compared to a regular broiler feed at 60 cents per kg because it only includes major maize and soya bean meal. But even at 100 cents per kg shrimp feed produced locally would normally be at lower prices than imported feeds (up to F$ 2 per kg).
Discussion
Location 3 km far from Prawn (Fiji) Ltd., Ravi Ravi. They give a certain willingness to be involved in production shrimp feed and ready to buy equipment in Naduruloulou, and to make feed with a proper die and rollers to get enough compactness on the feed.
They produce 5,000 mt per year in one shift of chicken feed with the help of Fether Lab. in New Zealand for formulations which give them a 6 months control on feeds increased to 3 times a year recently.
Equipment in the Factory
Cost including 20% profit margins give F$ 580 per ton for chicken feed.
Accompanied by Mr. Tanaka and Maciu Lagibalavu.
Persons met: Mr. Mitieli B. Bula and Isoa Vuki.
Purpose of the visit : Fisheries Division has made request to develop shrimp farming which is represented at the Prawn (Fiji) Ltd., Ravi Ravi:
The extension to 150 ha of the farm is foreseen in the near future, but the bottleneck now is the feed which is not locally produced but imported from New Caledonia or New Zealand and fish meal which can enter up to 30 to 40% in a shrimp feed formula. So a feasibility study on the production of pelleted shrimp fed in Fiji is undertaken.
This survey is done to try to answer to following questions :
Production of Fish Meal
They are in a position to produce 100 to 130 mt per month of tuna fish meal, which represents an amount of 60 mt of raw materials processed every day.
This fish meal is a by-product from the tuna canning industry.
Right now, there is enough for the local market but in the future, they think to export to New Zealand and Tonga. The local market is represented by local feed manufacturers who are adding fish meal to broiler feeds and swine feeds.
The production of fish meal is not for the moment coming along with fish oil or fish soluble and stick water. The demand for aquaculture should be around 20 mt per year, moving very soon to up to 300 mt per year.
Way of Processing
Three species are involved:
When skip jack and yellow fin tuna are used in the canning factory, they are cooked in a whole, then cooled overnight. With albacore species, fish are beheaded first.
The final product can be a blending of the three species or just a mixture of yellowfin and skipjack for example.
Overheated fish meal, coming sometimes from albacore is refused and given as a fertilizer or as a bait purpose for bottom fishing.
Bagging: 45 kg per bag.
The product at 55% C.P. is given for:
Quality of the Final Product
Fish meal is in fact a combination of head, guts, bones, and skin of tuna.
Proximate analysis are given as follows:
| - Crude protein | 55.5% |
| - Ash | 23.5% |
| - Moisture | 10.0% |
| - NaCl | 1.0% |
| - Fat | 10.0% |
It is a brown fish meal but not too dark. In order to get its real potentialities for inclusion in a shrimp feed, same additional analysis will be needed including:
Such values, together with amino acid determination and fatty acid profile will give a real good indication of nutrition value of PAFCO fish meal and its possible level of inclusion in a Penaeus monodon feed.
Later on, some analysis would be useful in order to distinct between tuna fish meal, whose product is cooked twice and albacore fish meal, which is just cooked once.
There is a real interest to know more about this local ingredient which could be of primary importance to sustain a shrimp feed production in Fiji and help start new aquaculture projects with shrimp.
From now on, it may be suggested that due to the level of fat content, an addition of antioxydant just before bagging operation would be highly recommended in order to preserve polyunsaturated fatty acids especially in case of export of the product.
One very positive thing is that production with a minimum quantity of 6 mt, can be adapted according to given specifications in order to give the product we are looking into.
PAFCO Fish Meals were sampled and sent to the IFREMER, France for detailed analysis. The following are the results obtained:
| - Protein | 57% |
| - Volatile base nitrogen | 83,6 mg/100g |
| - Histamine | 33,7 mg/100g = 337 ppm |
| - Thiobarbituric value | 89 mg Malonaldehyde/kg |
| - Peroxide value | 43 MEQ oxygen/kg of fat. |
Statement on quality of PAFCO Fish Meal.
It is a brown fish meal of average quality regarding its histamine content and protein level. Lipid level is pretty high with a level of peroxyde slightly over current reference value (around 10 MEQ per kg) and the absence of anti-oxydant agent could enhance peroxidation during storage.
However, considering the level of inclusion in a shrimp feed as recommended in the report, the use of PAFCO fish meal for a production of shrimp feed in Fiji is feasible.
