A Beginner's Guide to Loach Farming: Get Started Easily and Avoid Detours

For a long time, whenever it comes to loach, my mind has always been full of thoughts. I have always wanted to present my views on loach breeding, farming, and the market little by little in written form, but what word should I type next? It is so hard, and I do not know how to begin. I know that once I start, it will definitely not be possible to express clearly in a few hundred words or a few thousand words some of the things I truly want to say in my heart. The content below will be rather disorganized, but it will present some of the things I want to say to everyone in the form of a serial.

   1: Farmers should try as much as possible to choose dealers from their own city and surrounding counties and cities. There are issues of environment and region here, as well as the advantage of shorter transport time. 2: If you know that a dealer only has a volume of 1500 jin per day, do not ask them to wait a day to stock up more for you and deliver 2000 jin or 3000 jin at once. What we need is, from the moment the farmers catch them, to simplify a series of intermediate procedures and holding time, thereby ultimately improving the survival rate after they are put into the pond.    3: Ask the dealer to add 1 percent table salt during the packaging process. This has 2 benefits: through table salt, the osmotic pressure of the loach is reduced, reducing internal bleeding and bacterial infection caused by body damage. 4: When they are pulled to the farmer's pond edge, before weighing, the farmer should carefully look at the ratio of females to males. If there are more males, do not be polite with the dealer, just bargain him down. This is because male loaches grow much more slowly than female loaches, and their feed conversion ratio is also much higher than that of female loaches. Relatively speaking, this increases the farmer's costs. Do not underestimate this issue. In fact, this is a very important issue that more than 90 percent of farmers overlook. 5: If ice was added, it must go through a temperature buffering process, and as much as possible, after the temperature is balanced and consistent, release them into the pond at the upwind outlet of the pond. 6: Before releasing the fry, disinfection and sterilization must be carried out as appropriate. You can use sulfur ether sarafloxacin for a 5-8 minute medicinal bath to kill bacteria on the body surface. The greatest advantage of sulfur ether sarafloxacin is its incomparable penetrability: it can kill bacteria on the body surface and can also penetrate into the loach's epidermis to kill pathogens. This is a function that iodine preparations and chlorine preparations do not have. In the absence of sulfur ether sarafloxacin, iodine preparations (povidone iodine) can be used instead. This effect is not as good as sulfur ether sarafloxacin, but never use chlorine preparations (chlorine dioxide, bleaching powder). 7: Avoid releasing fry when the weather is bad, especially on rainy days. At the same time, also check the weather forecast. If there is rain within 3 days, do not release the fry. This point is the same as the nature of yellow eel. 8: Many of the tools dealers use for packaging are styrofoam boxes and plastic boxes with water packaging. Before pulling them to the farmer's pond, the farmer's first step is to check whether there are dead loaches at the bottom of the box (a small number of dead loaches will not float up). 9: If you can establish a relationship with a dealer, give them a heads-up in advance. You can wait, but at that time you must get good fry. 10: In some places, the quality of wild fry is still very good, such as Fan County and Puyang in Henan, Yingkou, Dawa, and Panjin in Liaoning, the Lu'an area in Anhui, and the Yinchuan area in Ningxia. What needs attention is that some unscrupulous dealers, even when they clearly have high-quality fry from these places, mix in inferior fry from other places and sell them to farmers as good while passing off inferior goods as superior. Farmers have no way to distinguish, and can only rely on the degree of acquaintance between the farmer and the dealer. 11: Farmers must tell the dealer in advance that the specifications must be properly sorted by size, and by no means should the difference exceed 50 tails per jin. For example, if what you need is 150 tails per jin, what you can accept is 125-175 tails per jin. If this point is not controlled well, the later farming results and benefits will be relatively poor. 12: For the pond before releasing fry, strict pond clearing, disinfection, and sterilization must be carried out. You can do this 8-10 days in advance, keep the pond water depth at 10CM, use 250-300 jin of quicklime per mu, dissolve it in water, and splash it over the whole pond (this amount is a bit heavy), and turn over the bottom mud. After 3 days, add water. The water inlet should be wrapped with a net of 80 mesh or above. Check whether the enclosure net has any damage, etc.