The Tilapia Are Coming, The Tilapia Are Coming!

Over the last few months, I have been working with 12 farmers in San Luis to introduce the cultivation of fish. The first step of the project was to build the tanks. The majority of tanks were simple holes in the ground, no deeper than a meter, that were then covered with a sheet of black construction plastic. In some places, the ground was too rocky, so tanks were built with bricks or adobe blocks. A few very excited farmers made a larger investment and cemented the sides of their tank, making the structure a bit more permanent. With plastic, the project is extremely cheap and easily repeated, making it a solidly sustainable project in very rural, poor areas.


After all the tanks were constructed, we had to fill the tanks with water. Since only about half the homes in San Luis have water, and even where there is water, it only falls for 30 or 45 minutes every 4th or 5th day, filling the tanks posed a large problem. I solicited the help of the nearby sugar cane cooperative, which loaned us a tractor and a large mobile water tank which we filled up from a spring then brought house to house. The spring was far away and down a very large hill, so even in 5 or 6 hours of work every morning, we were only able to fill 2 tanks a day (on a good day). It ended up taking 8 straight days of making the long treks in the tractor to fill up the mobile water tank then bringing the water back to San Luis. The locations of the tanks proved incredibly hard to reach by tractor and required quite a bit of ingenuity.


In two cases, the fish tanks were just impossible to reach, so water had to be brought in buckets by foot to the tank. Each of these tanks took an entire day to fill. Although very tiring, it was inspiring to see entire families (and I mean entire families--from toddlers with tiny buckets to grandmothers basically transporting what seemed to me to be teacups of water) working to fill up their tanks.


Wednesday afternoon, a counterpart of mine who works for the Ministry of Agriculture's Freshwater Fish Division arrived with a truck full of over 1,000+ baby fish (2 to 3 weeks old), in individual bags packed for every farmer. The 1,000+ fish were donated free of charge by the Ministry of Agriculture and brought from their fish cultivation center near Sonsonate, a city about 3 hours away.

The bags had too be placed in the fish tanks for 5 to 10 minutes before releasing the baby fish into their new homes. Allowing the water temperature to equalize is critical, as releasing the small fish into water of a much different temperature can quickly shock and kill them.


The 12 farmers in San Luis are now raising grey tilapia. There are two types of tilapia--red and grey--but grey grow slightly quicker and birds are less likely to swoop down and make a snack out of them. If farmers take good care of the fish, they should be full-grown in 4 months, although in my experience with similar projects in other parts of El Salvador, Salvadorans don't have the patience to wait the last month, and usually eat their fish after just 3 or 3.5 months, when the fish are, as a Ministry of Agriculture friends joked, "the size of a tortilla."


Fish cultivation is a completely new concept in the area I live, so it was pretty interesting to watch the reactions of families to their new "pets" and future dinners. One small, 4-year-old girl had already begun crying before we had even moved on to the next house, after her father accidentally broke the news in front of her that, yes, in fact, they would be eating her new "pets" in a few months.


If all goes to plan, the fish should represent a large improvement to the levels of protein in people's diets, as fish (and all meat in general) is usually out of the price range of most San Luis residents. About 10 fish can be fit for every square meter of tank, so the farmer's are all raising between 60 and 100 fish, depending on the size of their tank. The farmers, especially those with the largest tanks, are also planning on supplementing their income at points during the year when there is not a corn or bean harvest to bring money in, by selling fish.


I chose to introduce fish cultivation to San Luis with tilapia because they are among the easiest types of fish to raise. The tanks do not need to be any deeper than one meter--or else the sun won't reach the bottom--and tilapia thrive in warm water and sunny environments. They are also very easy to feed, eating just about anything. In my community farmers are feeding them ground-up corn and/or sorghum, but they can also be fed tortillas, bread, 4 or 5 types of weeds that grow abundantly during the rainy season, and a few indigenous flowers.



While the fish are small, there is no need to make sure there is enough oxygen in the water (like in a home fish tank)--the sun can do that. However, as the fish grow (in about 6 weeks), the farmers will have to come up with some way of making sure there is plenty of oxygen in the water at night. While pumps are the easiest way, they are expensive, so the majority of the farmers will just be hanging ever-so-slightly opened upside-down soda bottles above the tanks and allowing water to drip out all night.