How to seize the golden time for mullet polyculture?

Aquaculture farmers in Chaoshan, Shenzhen, Dongguan and other areas of our province who let the four major Chinese carps and tilapia be polycultured with mullet in freshwater ponds mostly achieve relatively good economic returns. Polyculturing mullet in home fish ponds requires little investment and yields high profits, and is worth trying for farmers who raise the four major Chinese carps and tilapia.

Mullet (scientific name Mugil cephalus), mainly produced along the southeastern coast of China, has wide adaptability: it can live in seawater and, through desalination, can also be farmed in a completely freshwater environment. After its fry are caught by hand and desalinated, they are put into freshwater fish ponds to be polycultured together with freshwater fish. This neither affects the original pond's output of home fish nor requires special farming environments or techniques; it is enough to release the fry at the right time, reinforce the escape-prevention facilities, and manage them as before.

Mullet mainly feeds on plant-based food, algal mud, plankton in the fertilized pond water, and leftover bait from other fish. It can also feed on low-nutrition foods such as rice bran, straw bran, wheat bran and cornmeal. At the same time, mullet can improve pond water quality and plays the role of a "scavenger." Therefore, polyculturing mullet with other fish in freshwater ponds has the advantages of easy management, low cost and high returns.

Mullet is plump and delicious with extremely rich nutrition, and finished fish sell very well. It is a fine dish on the tables of restaurants, eateries and ordinary urban and rural people today. "Minglu mullet" is especially a famous dish in restaurants and has won widespread praise from consumers.

For mullet polyculture, release 200-300 fry of about 3 cm in size per mu of pond (water depth 1.2-2 m). If the pond is normally fed with feed and has aerators and good irrigation and drainage facilities, the stocking amount can be appropriately increased. For fry that have been desalinated and acclimated, the survival rate can reach 80%-95%. After 1 year of stocking, the fish weigh 500-750 grams, the yield per mu is over 150 kg, the market price is 16-20 yuan per kg, and the output value per mu can reach 2,500-4,000 yuan, making the economic benefits very considerable. Therefore, mullet is an indispensable high-quality species in aquaculture.

The fry release season for mullet is extremely specific, mainly completed from "Major Cold" to before "Spring Equinox" each year. Once this golden time for releasing fry is missed, the pond will have no fry to stock, affecting the economic benefits of a whole year of farming. For this reason, farmers must make fry release plans and order fry in advance to ensure that the pond improves its farming economic benefits by polyculturing mullet.