Catfishes are a diverse group of ray-fines fish which include Corydoras, Synodontis, Bagrid,Dora, Botia, Dianema, Pimelodus, Brochis. They get their name from their prominent barbels which resemble a cat’s whiskers. Catfish range in size and behavior from the heaviest and longest. The most commonly cultured species is the channel catfish, Ictalurus punctatus, although a hybrid between the channel catfish and the blue catfish, Ictalurus furcatus, is growing in popularity. Channel catfish are a warmwater species with an optimal temperature for growth of 85°F (29°C). In the wild, catfish are omnivores, feeding on a wide variety of animal and plant materials. In culture ponds, fish are fed a complete diet, typically composed of soybean meal and other seed or grain products, with only a small amount of animal protein.
As catfish are of considerable commercial importance, Feed constitutes the most important cost in catfish production. Nigeria still imports feeds, but these are becoming extremely hard for local farmers to afford, due to the high cost of logistics involved in bringing them into the country, as well as the increasing depreciation of the naira against the dollar. Farmers who depend on imported feeds end up incurring so much cost that their profit margin is minimised.It's important to reduce cost for catfish farmer.
Catfish feed pellets made by fish feed extruder machine https://www.zenopelletmachine.com/product/fish-feed-extruder-machine/ are extruded catfish food with many benefits for the growth of catfish, and thus they have been the first choice for catfish feeding.
Pelleting is to process the mixture of feed ingredients under high temperature, moisture and high pressure within fish feed pellet mill – raw materials are pressed through die mold. According to lots of experience, too little or too much steam and heat added to the ingredients would produce pellet with poor quality while insufficient temperature and uneven mixing could not kill the dangerous pathogenic micro-organisms existing in feed pellets. The path to the perfect fish feed pellet requires top processing technology and advanced pellet mill and fish feed extruder.
if fish farmers want to produce feed pellet that hits precise quality targets in terms of size, durability, density and nutritional composition, they should choose suitable feed pellet machine according to their investment cost, production scale, and feeding characteristics and habits of different aquatic animals. Our pellet mill is able to produce high quality feed pellets for fish and also for pets like dog and cat. Moreover, it is not hard to produce feed pellets with different diameters (usually from 0.9mm to 15mm), just changing the size of pellet mill die mold, which gives fish farmers more flexible choice according to fish type and growth situation.