A Detailed Guide to Toad (Bufo) Farming Techniques

The toad, also called the Bufo, is an amphibian with warty skin, and the toad venom extracted from its body is also a rare traditional Chinese medicinal material. So, what farming techniques are there for toads? Let's find out together!

1. Site construction

Toads like to hide in mud burrows, under damp stones, and within grass, and they lie dormant during the day, only coming out to move about in the evening and at night, so the site should be built as close as possible to these places, and it should also be concealed to allow them to lie dormant during the day. In addition, to prevent them from escaping, a wall or net should be set up around the breeding site, and a breeding pond, spawning pond and hatching pond should also be built, with lighting equipment installed inside, turned on at night to attract moths and insects for them to prey on.

2. Breeding

Toads are egg-laying animals with extremely strong reproductive capacity; each female toad can lay 4000-5000 eggs each time. Place the eggs in water at a temperature of 10-30 degrees, and they will hatch in about 3-4 days. When starting to farm them, you can capture wild toads that are robust and free of disease or injury as breeding stock, or you can bring back the eggs laid by toads to hatch on your own.

3. Feeding

Toads mainly feed on beetles, moths, snails, fly maggots and so on. Newly hatched toad tadpoles live on the residual nutrients of the egg for the first two days, and only begin to take food from the outside on the third day; at this time they can be fed bait such as cooked egg yolk and water fleas. Young toads can be fed fly maggots, earthworms and yellow mealworms, while adult toads have a larger appetite, and feeding them fly maggots, earthworms and yellow mealworms costs relatively more, so you can use soybean cake, flour, fish meal and so on mixed together as feed, and let them hunt mosquitoes and insects on their own. Leave open ground in or beside the pond to plant lawn or vegetables, and stock an appropriate amount of aquatic plants.

4. Farming management

After hatching, pay attention to the rearing density of the tadpoles. At the start, keep fewer than 4000 tadpoles per sq m, and after half a month reduce it to fewer than 1000 tadpoles per sq m, while young toads should be kept at about 30-40 per sq m, reared in groups according to different growth stages. In the tadpole pond, the water depth should be between 20-40cm, and the water temperature should be 18-28 degrees. In winter, when it is cold, toads enter dormancy; you can raise the site temperature to prevent them from going dormant. In addition, pay attention to pest and disease control. Toads have relatively few diseases; what you need to watch out for are pests, especially rats and snakes, to prevent such creatures from entering the farm and eating the toads, which would affect economic returns.

In addition, when farming toads, pay attention to frost damage; in winter toads go dormant, and mastering overwintering techniques is the key to toads overwintering safely. The editor will explain this in the next article.

The above is the toad farming techniques compiled by the editor. I hope it can help you!