What are the three main benefits of polyculture of fish and soft-shelled turtles in ponds?

The soft-shelled turtle farming industry is one of China's high-quality and high-efficiency special aquaculture industries. Since its development began in the early 1970s at the end of the last century, annual output has now reached more than 100,000 tons, ranking first in the world. Although the current market price of commercial soft-shelled turtles is low, market sales remain undiminished. However, for sustainable and healthy development in the future, new farming models and feasible optimal approaches still need to be found.

According to the author's years of investigation, research and farming practice, using existing aquaculture ponds for polyculture is the best approach for China's future development of healthy soft-shelled turtle farming. There are three reasons:

First benefit: the pond environment is good and management is convenient

Because the pond area is large, the water is deep, and it is under natural outdoor climate conditions, the farming environment is better than factory-based greenhouses and intensive small cement ponds. Especially in terms of management, apart from preventing escape, stocking and harvesting, all other management can simply follow the original pond's cultured species. There are also many ways to polyculture soft-shelled turtles in ponds, such as fish and soft-shelled turtle, fish and freshwater mussel and soft-shelled turtle, shrimp and soft-shelled turtle, crab and soft-shelled turtle polyculture, and so on.

Second benefit: low cost, good quality and high efficiency

Because existing ponds are used for polyculture, a large amount of funds for building soft-shelled turtle ponds and annual equipment depreciation costs can be saved. In particular, the stocking density of soft-shelled turtle seed in polyculture ponds is determined according to the amount of natural bait in the pond, so most can adopt a stocking model with no feeding or little feeding. In this way, farming costs can be reduced by more than half compared with conventional soft-shelled turtle farming. Moreover, because soft-shelled turtles polycultured in ponds are vigorous and eat natural bait, their quality is like that of wild ones. For example, Tongxiang City in Zhejiang Province uses shrimp ponds to polyculture Jiangnan flower soft-shelled turtles. Not only is the per-mu benefit several times higher than single-species farming, but the quality of both the farmed shrimp and soft-shelled turtles is better than in single-species farming, and they are deeply welcomed by local consumers.

Third benefit: improve pond utilization and save land

After reform and opening up, due to construction needs, land resources have become increasingly scarce, especially in developed coastal areas, where land resources are as precious as gold. Therefore, using existing ponds to polyculture Chinese soft-shelled turtles can not only improve pond utilization but also save a large amount of precious land. China currently has several million mu of ponds that can be used for polyculture. If calculated at 100 turtles per mu, more than several hundred thousand mu of land can be saved, which is of great significance.