esshup, if one starts out with small 2 or 2.5" fingerling lmb, what are they eating when @ the fish supplier? Fish food?' I understand some of these fingerlings are cannibals and will or attempt to eat each other, but will they learn to eat fish food or starve? Or can one feed worms, or something to get them to lets say 5"?
Tracy
Tracy, about 50-75% of the LMB fingerlings will starve before trying pelleted feed.
Feed-trained LMB are much pricier because it takes a LOT of time, expensive "natural" feeds (often Krill), food mixing, etc before you'll get the fingerlings onto pelleted feed, plus you lose about half the fish in the transformation/training.
All that said, some are having better success than others, feed training LMB. Higher density holding pens encourage natural competition to eat anything that moves, and reduces mortality while speeding the training, yet one little mistake made in high density holding pens, and every fish in the pen can be dead in minutes.
High risk, high labor, and high losses, equals high prices.
I'm currently working to re-open a fish farm with a guy that is having phenomenal success raising feed trained LMB, currently, over 100,000 in the 6-10" sizes...it has taken him 5 years of losses on his annual tax return through capital investment and fish loss before he finally got into the black last year
