Aquaculture Inside the Wire

I’ve been a bit frustrated over the last several days. Babylon is the province with the largest area of aquaculture ponds in the country, yet I’ve only seen two rather small fish farms (although these were very interesting to visit). The province also has two very large fish farms (each around 1,000 acres), neither of which I have seen or am likely to see. I’ve not seen any hatcheries or feed mills. Our schedule has been largely controlled by the military and the places we have visited have been pre-selected.

Much of what I have come to know about aquaculture has occurred “inside the wire,” on FOB Kalsu, the U.S. military base where we have been staying the last few days. Fortunately, I have been able to meet with a couple of really interesting and knowledgeable people to learn about aquaculture here.

A couple of days ago, Dr. Khalil I. Saleh from Musayyib Technical College came to the FOB to give the team a talk on aquaculture in Iraq. Dr. Saleh is a wiry, slightly-built man, extremely personable and engaging. His English is excellent and tinged with a distinct French accent no doubt picked up during his doctorate work at a university in Toulouse. I liked him right away, a fellow fish brother. We had a chance to chat during lunch and before his talk. I had so many questions to ask, which continued right up until the moment he had to leave.

Then, yesterday, I met with Duane Stone of INMA, which is part of USAID’s effort in agricultural development over here. Duane is a former Special Forces soldier and has experience working at a feed mill and a fish farm with catfish and tilapia in North Carolina. Duane has been working with one of the largest fish farms in the country, the Euphrates Fish Farm. (Incidentally, the “correct” pronunciation phonetically is Oi-fur-ot.) The Euphrates Fish Farm has about 1,000 water surface acres. The main production ponds are 100 acres each! Duane was working with the farm to produce fingerlings for distribution to farmers. At it’s peak the farm produced about 12 million fingerlings. Last year the farm produced 2 million fingerlings, which were distributed to about 100 farmers who had registered and become members of their local agricultural associations, which appear to be the main mechanism to transfer subsidies, technology, and information to farmers.

Aquaculture in Iraq includes several large-scale operations like Euphrates Fish Farm, but most farms are small. Overall, the average farm size in Iraq is about 20-30 dunam (1 dunam = 2,500 m2 = 0.62 acres). The average fish farm has about 1-5 ponds, each of which is about 1-5 dunam. Ponds are stocked at a low density (1 fish per 10-15 m2) because options to aerate ponds at higher fish densities are limited by the lack of consistent and reliable electrical power nationwide. The interesting thing about these family-scale ponds is the use of on-farm inputs such as barley and alfalfa as sources of nutrition for the fish. The interest in improving the quality of feeds for aquaculture in Iraq is keen. However, the country has no source of oil-seed meal, which would serve as the key source of protein in the diet. Most manufactured feeds are produced by dry extrusion, resulting in a sinking pellet with poor water stability. Most of the mills that produce feed are small by Western standards, but they are multi-purpose, producing feed for poultry too.

I just realized that I had not mentioned the species of fish that are grown! Common carp dominates, but the system also includes silver carp and grass carp, each at about 10% of the stocked population. Not a big carp fan here, but the market acceptance is good and ALL fish are marketed live. I visited with one fish seller in the market in Jabella and he sells between 50-100 kg of live fish every day, enough to make a decent living by current standards. Apparently the live fish market on River Road in Baghdad is something to see. Iraqis like to eat fish at least once a week, usually on Friday, but Wednesday is also a good day to eat carp.

There is a concerted effort to get fish farmers to register as official farms and to join their local agricultural association. The criteria to register as an official farm include:
1) siting ponds on reclaimed land,
2) siting ponds on land where soils are too saline for crop production, and
3) siting ponds where water use will not impact water for irrigation.
Basically this means that “official” fish farms should be located in marginal land, not suitable for crop production. Carp can tolerate the slightly saline water (3-4 ppt) that drains from irrigated fields. Soil salinization has been and continues to be a chronic problem with irrigated agriculture in a hot desert environment.

Did I say how hot it was today? Go pre-heat your oven to 450. Once pre-heated open the oven door and stick your face in the blast of heat. That’s what it was like today, for some reason much hotter than any day so far, somewhere in the upper 120s. Don’t know if I’ve ever experienced heat like that. It felt like my eyeballs were going to dry out and shrivel up. The breeze was biting. Yikes! Another day like this forecast for tomorrow.

More on aquaculture later, but thought I’d give a flavor of that here, especially b/c it’s the title of this blog.