I do not have any experience with getting fish directly from Anderson Fish Farm. Someone else will have to help you with that.
I have some but not a lot of experience with raising minnows in tubs and tanks. Basically the more minnows or fish weight (includes growth in biomass) you put per gallon of water the more filtration that is needed to keep water quality good so fish are healthy enough to grow "rapidly" and stay healthy. First thing to become slowed with stress to fish is the growth rate. More stress equals slowed growth.
Before anyone can provide any specific ideas or suggestions to your minnow raising "system", we have to know if you plan to use a static water (RAS) or flow through system.
POSTSCRIPT.
Feeding fish to fish is a very inefficient and costly way to grow fish. Fish as forage items costs approximently $3.00-$6.00 per pound (As Chris mentions below they can be as high as $12.50/lb). Predators convert fish into body biomass (growth) at about a 10:1 ratio due to the high percentage of water in the forage fish body mass. A big amount of the energy is also spent chasing food items. Thus you do not get very much or a very good conversion ratio of using fish as food weight to produce fish body weight increase of predators. Catfish, panfish and omnivorous fish convert food at a slightly better ratio than predators. These non-predatory fish can also produce good weight gain on lower protein content foods i.e. 32% protein pellets such a Game fish chow). A 5:1 to 10:1 ratio is a fairly standard range of conversion ratio when using live fish as food.
However if fish (many panfish and bass) eat a high protein fish pellet, such as Aquamax 41% protein, the conversion ratio is close to or slightly below a 2:1 ratio. Author's NOTE: The conversion ratio can vary with the species of fish and availability of food items in the pond. Fish that feed lower on the food chain often have low conversion ratios with pellet foods. Pellet food conversion ratios have been found to be as low as 0.9:1 for koi in an open pond (KY Aquatic Farming Vol 20(2) 2007). Thus it is much better economically to feed the fish high protein fish pellets compared to feeding them fish or live food. High quality fish pellets cost about 50-60 cents per pound. Thus each $1.00-$1.20 produces close to a pound of fish biomass. You do the comparsion math.
ONE OF THE BASIC MISTAKES that pond owners make with feeding pelleted food to their pond fish is to allow the trend of fish biomass to INCREASE in terms of fish numbers instead of fish size. The most common results of this are seeing symptoms of feeding a lot of fish food while seeing little visible gain (growth) from all the food that has been fed. Without proper regulation of fish numbers of abundance, too much of the pelleted nutrition goes into MORE NUMBERS of smaller fish instead of noticable weight and length increases of fewer larger fish. To combat this problem one has to properly manage or perform harvest of select sizes within the fish community so food source items are channeled into fewer quality fish instead of more and more smaller or medium sized fish. As with numerous pond topics, proper and wise management is the key component to success.
There are pros and cons to feeding fish pellets vs using excusively fish as forage items, but this is one of the bacic pros. Getting fish to eat fish pellets or training them to eat pellets especially predator fish is whole new topic; maybe one for PBoss magazine. I will put that on my list.
Last edited by Bill Cody; 09/09/07 08:23 PM.
