Flosell gets SDF grant to install modern recirculation aquaculture system
Though the aquaculture industry in Ghana is a relatively young one, it has enormous potential for growth. This projected growth is why President John Mahama has established a new Ministry of Fisheries and Aquaculture, tasking it with the responsibility of ensuring the development of aquaculture in the country to supplement the overall protein requirements of the nation.
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According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), there is a huge explosion in the production, export and consumption of fish, especially tilapia, in Africa, USA and the EU with the US importing over $1 billion worth of tilapia in 2012.
The annual estimated demand for fish in Ghana is over 800,000 tonnes against production which is less than 200,000 tonnes.
The demand for fingerlings, particularly in Ghana and West Africa in general, is so high that close to 60 per cent of fish farmers along the Volta Lake have to wait for an average of between two and three months to get their supply of fingerlings and up to 25 per cent of them still never get supplied.
The small town of Bakpa-Tademe, near Sogakope in the Volta Region is the newest to see the growth and establishment of a modern recirculating aquaculture hatchery for the production of table-size tilapia and tilapia fingerlings by Flosell Limited.
Producing about 150 tonnes of table-size tilapia at their initial site at Dawhenya and about 800,000 fingerlings annually, Flosell, like other hatcheries employed primitive technologies which saw low survival rates for the fingerlings.
In the case of Flosell, even though they yielded in excess of 170,000 tilapia fingerlings fortnightly, by the time of their growth, they harvested just about 70,000, registering losses averaging 60 per cent. This was due to the manual processes they employed, coupled with the high level of contamination of the fresh river water. Additionally, the unavailability of modern breeding technologies led to high mortality rates thereby reducing annual productivity by 60 per cent.
In a recent interview at the project site, Mr Evans Danso, the Managing Director of the company, intimated that such a capital-intensive downward spiral had to be harnessed, so during the Fourth Call for proposals by the Skills Development Fund (SDF), in January of 2014, “we took the opportunity to present a proposal with the objective to introduce innovations that will halt this trend and spur growth.”
He stressed that they contacted Flueren & Nooijen, an expert company in the Recirculating Aquaculture System (RAS) based in The Netherlands, to set up the technology with the capacity to produce up to 1,800,000 fingerlings per month.
Based on their technology requirements, Flosell received a GH¢486,851.84 grant from SDF and provided the mandatory counterpart funding of GH¢162,283.50 to undertake the project of establishing the Recirculating Aquaculture System (RAS) that would ensure constant production of healthy tilapia and fingerlings that meet international food safety standards.
With the SDF intervention, the company currently has a clean and hygienic hatchery which houses 24 1,200-gallon tank nursery with each tank capable of holding up to 40,000 fingerlings. They also have 12 specially designed tanks for breeding 14,000 fingerlings each. The hatchery is also equipped with 16 additional tanks which hold about 15,200 fingerlings each in what they refer to as the Sex Reverse Aisle, being the hormonal development stage of the fingerlings.
Operating with purified water through Reverse Osmosis from the Volta River, Flosell has provided employment for 15 new staff in the community it operates and is currently producing 650,000 tilapia fingerlings monthly to meet the ever growing demand from locals as well as international farmers.
The current mortality rate of less than five per cent is a huge improvement over the previous system of production which culminated in a 60 per cent mortality rate of fingerlings. The company plans to increase production to 1,800,000 fingerlings by December 2015.
Mr Danso expressed extreme gratitude to SDF for taking his aquaculture business to a different level.
On the future of Flosell, he revealed that after undertaking several environmental assessment studies, Flosell also cordoned off a section of the Volta River’s bank closest to the hatchery, where they transfer fingerlings into the river within specially installed cages for holding breeders. With further expansion, he said, this will also add to the cultivation of full-sized fish to meet the ever growing demand for tilapia.