Catfish sales are on the rise!

Catfish, its fresh and cheaper than the imports

It took three months to bring the fish up to their current size and I must confess that it was my wife who did most of the work, in the huge fish troughs we erected in our back yard in Ota. This is our second cycle and I promise you the going hasn't been easy. We understand that there is a shortage of fish in the market in Nigeria because a lot of the importers of frozen fish have bowed out because of the high cost of exchanging the dollar. If you are buying One dollar for N406 you can imagine what that would do to your finances! So, for the past three months that I've been away speaking at one seminar or the other my wife has been tending the fish watching them grow from tadpole sized fries to the table sized one kilogram whoppers.
The fish is fresh, they eat good feed and weigh quite a lot. I just cant imagine our obsession for imported mackerel, crocker and Stockfish that I understand comes all the way for Norway. There are various forms of feed ranging from the locally milled ones that farmers are making themselves onto the imported stuff that is also costing a lot because of the interest rate. In our first cycle we used all manner of feed: Coppens, Alar Aqua, etc. These days the cost is quite high so we have evolved a strategy that keeps costs down: Buy the imported starter feed, that is feed that the fish eat when they are young and fragile. We have also learnt that we have to fortify them with antibiotics right from youth so that they do not get sick and die off prematurely. In the first cycle we lost close to 700 fish because we had no idea that we had to treat them and be mindful of the source of the boost stock that we got our fries from.
This morning when my wife brought out the first over 1kg table sized catfish that a neighbor had opted to buy I felt a swell a of pride. The second cycle sales have started and we did not have to wait as long as the first cycle before sales commenced.
  Catfish sales are on the rise because of the reduction of the importation of fish. We learnt to keep costs as low as possible and now we are selling retail instead wholesale. The whole idea is to break the hold of the middle men who do nothing but bring a little money and offer ridiculous prices for the fish per unit. Retail is the best since we would be making almost double the profit that we made in the first cycle.
If my projections work, by the end of the year we would have been able to expand the numbers we breed and ensure that we are selling as much as we can at retail prices from outlets we would create ourselves. I am happy that the business is picking up. My only apprehension is that we need cash to expand to the level that I have in mind.