On the slopes of Mua Hills in Machakos County, lies Kamuthanga Aqua Fish Farm, the only farm in East and Central Africa certified by the Africa Organisation for Standardisation (ARSO).
The farm received the platinum certification on March 8, this year in an event held at Sarova Hotel in Nairobi. The tilapia farm, developed by FoodTechAfrica, was first to receive the EcoMark Africa (EMA) label in Africa, in an event graced by ARSO President, Dr Eve Gadzikwa and Secretary General, Dr Hermogene Nsengiana.
Dr Gadzikwa said the farm was recognised for propagating modern aqua fishing and operating ecologically with the environment.
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The farm director Anthony Ndeto (Pictured) founded it in 2015, but started operating two years later after a false start using an obsolete method of fish farming.
“The technology we initially had was made up of local materials and ponds. We then realised we could not do much with it and imported Sh5 million equipment to build one of a kind aqua farm, which consists of hatcheries, incubators, brooders, fingerling nursery tanks, swimmer up systems and a grow-up,” said Mr Ndeto.
The farm sits on a five-hectares land and each day they supply over 200, 400-500 grams of fish to leading supermarkets and a Chinese firm in Nairobi.
“The Chinese firm picks live fish which we transport in a truck with water tank and oxygen cylinder with air filtration that gives the fish oxygen to their destination. The fish sell at between Sh400 and Sh500,” he told Smart Harvest.
The farm has two types of brooders, YY technology and local technology. YY technology also known as Till Aqua, the farmmanager Joseph Odhiambo, explained is a fish imported from Netherlands and is purely a male species with YY chromosomes only.
The collected eggs are given to a female fish to hatch, and produces a fish product named XY, while the local technology, the manager noted is based on purely local fish.
“To know which species of fish we have, we tag the YY technology male fish with a chip and have a scanner that when used to scan the fish gives a code of the fish, each of the tagged fish has a particular code number and a name, for example we have Akinyi, Adhiambo, Mweni, so on and forth. The local fish is not tagged making it easy for separation,” said Odhiambo.
Patrick Maina, assistant farm manager, said when a male fishis ready to lay eggs, it turns yellowish or pinkish, this attracts the female fish, and the process of fertilisation begins.
“When a male fish turns pinkish or yellowish, the female species automatically knows the male fish is ready to lay eggs, it (female) then approaches the male for fertilisation, the female fish then keeps the eggs on its mouth for 12 days,” said Maina.
He added: “We then pick the eggs from the mouth of the female fish after 12 days, using a double net, with the first net used to filter unwanted materials from the eggs, while the second net picks the eggs.”
The eggs are then separated by an adjustable grader, with the big ones (fast growing) being separated from the smaller ones (slow growing), they are then placed in six different incubators, with the eggs placed on each incubator according to the sizes.
Adjustable graders give the fingerlings an opportunity to grow uniformly. “Placing fast growing fish together with slow growing ones leads to cannibalisation,” said Ndeto.
At the incubator also known as a fingerling nursery tank, the one gram fish are placed on controllable temperatures, fingerlings require humidity of 26 degree centigrade, and they have 70 reservoir tanks with each tank able to hold 4000 litres of water, and 20 thousand fingerlings that are then left to grow for 40-45 days into 50grams.
After growing to 50grams, the fish are transferred to the grow-out where the final process of fish growing is done, in the grow-out, the fish is fed with fish food bought from animal feed stores.
They have 50 cubic meters ponds, each square meter can hold 135 fish in a controlled environment, from which the fishis left to grow for between four-five months into between 400 grams-500 grams.
