Finally...The tanks

After a couple of setbacks we have finally been able to level the terrain and put the first three tanks up. It's a great sight. Monday the other 40 will arrive so that will keep us busy for the next week.

Almost there....!

Marco, Didi and Mimi great Job!!

New borns

Over the past couple of weeks we had several spawnings of Tilapias. Some were put into aquaria. Not an ordinary one but with a view! Looks like they are swimming in the palmtrees LOL.

Life is a Beach

No news other than all is well and we decided to take the weekend off. Marco and family went to Caracas Bay on the left and Ronald was at Avila Beach on the right.

There are so many beautifull beaches here on Curacao that it is always difficult to choose.

We know where your house lives.

A couple of weeks since we started and we have 231 visitors to date.

But where do they come from? Todays technology show us even the cities.

Willemstad, Amsterdam ,Amstelveen ,Drachten ,Leeuwarden, The Hague, Almere, Emmen Breda ,Paris, Laren, Nijmegen, San Francisco ,Seroe Blanco, Haan, Ft. Worth, Zuid Laren, Reston, Wilson, Tampa.

Thanks for visiting us. If you want you can leave a comment with each article or mail us.

Before and After

Two hundred trees, tons of soil, buckets of sweat, ten times welding the tractor axel, and numerous beers we are almost there. The old set up is now almost gone, including the chicken coop. This week the nets and tarps will be there from the States and the farm will look completely different by next weekend. Then the next week the 40 tanks will arrive and the fun can really start.

Half Moon

As everyone knows (not) fish orchestrate their lives around the cycles of the moon.

We now are in to the second rising of the moon after we first put them in their tanks.

And we are just astonished to watch the progress. The tilapia have spawned already we now have two tanks with baby fish.

They are minute and cute. try finding them in the picture. Have fun!

Lost & Found

Wednesday , 9th of april

Unbelievable on a 3 hectare farm! Mimi and I are walking to one of the fishtanks that we cleaned last sunday. She suddenly yells Marco come have a look! Arrivig at where she is I see her pointing her foot at Ronalds Rolex submariner ring.

The location where we found the ring happens to be close to the work out course that we have for our kids. Maybe, just maybe, the big guy is secretely trying to loose weight. Let's see net week.

Watch your watch

Sunday, 6th of april.

As usual we were pushing ourselves hard to be ready in time. Working the tractor is a new hobby for Ronald and so is food. My BBQ's are a great succes as well as the indonesian rice dish i make, judging by Ronalds appetite. However before food, comes checking the fish first and cleaning one of the tanks. After which we enjoyed the cool breeze on the veranda. During our evaluation of the week whilst BBQing the meat, I was suddenly wide awake when Ronald exclaimed "Shit"! I looked at him with surprise since he is not known to use such strong language (lol).
What happened was that he lost the outside gold minute ring of his ROLEX.

We searched the whole place over and over but were unfortunately not succesfull.

Many Visitors

This weekend we had many visitors. They all enjoyed their stay with us we were told. And for us that's what counts. We regularly have groups for tours on the farm and we enjoy having them.Please feel free to visit us!

The development of the farm is getting into a more busy period. We have almost cleared a 1000 m2 area where the new tanks will be installed. They will arrive in two weeks so we have to hurry up.

This week we have to install the nets to protect our fish against the many birds and the tarps to protect the new tanks against the mother of all thorny plants the Curacao pikas!

All but one of our redclaws are now with berries and the tilapias have all spawned!

In the mean time we are lucky that even my kids help us out a little. Rawin and Rima really enjoy all the new fish and activities.

Get a room!

OK we promised you a picture of the mating of Red Claws and you will get a picture of the mating of Red Claws (not).

We have tried and tried but every time we wanted to make a picture our red claws simply didnt want to perform.Untill we have the real deal here is what it looks like.

The one on top is the female. The male places a small sperm package on the females genetalia. She then pushes her eggs out through the package towards her tail which she then curls up. The eggs then stay for about 4 weeks under her, still curled-up, tail.

The way the females then walk, with a curled tail under their body, is a sure sign she is, what is called, "berried". We now have several females in this condition in our tanks. They will deliver anywhere between 400 and 900 young (see picture on the right)

Credits for the left picture go to Christian Lukhaup from Germany. The other of a female with eggs is from Colin & Ursula Valverde of the Aquaverde Farm in Atherton, Australia.

How are the tilapias doing ?

Well fine , thank you!

We dont have too many pictures of them yet because we dont want to disturb them.

Our line of red Tilapias are brooding. We have observed several females with eggs.

They are oral incubators so they keep them in their mouth for protection.

Obviously we dont want to give them any stress. On the picture on the right you get a good view what breeding in the mouth looks like. More info on : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilapia_in_aquaculture and http://ag.arizona.edu/azaqua/ata.html

How Bonkie went Awol and Ricard saved the day.

Ok today we have a story most people wouldn't believe. This time it's me ,Ronald, posting, since Marco is too shy to brag. It's a story about two animals. A few posts ago we mentioned the propensity of red claws to go walkabout. Last night we had one missing again. This time it was our top breeder, named Bonkie (don't ask me why pls). He is the one on the left. He went AWOL. The day before we had put an extra couple of females with him after his buddy in the other tank was MIA. Whether the extra duty was too much for him we dont know, he was simply gone.

We really needed to find the guy. luckily Marco had an epiphany. Why I dont know, he just had one. Happens all the time with this guy. In another life he used to train dogs in his spare time. Not the everyday sit, lie or fetch kind of training, but the serious stuff, find a bomb, drugs, explosives,corpses, you name it. He could train his dogs for anything.

Why not try to find Bonkie with my best dog, Ricard (one of his belgian shepherds, a Malinois to be precise, Mechelse herder for our Dutch friends)? In comes Ricard. Marco holds one of the other Red Claws in front of his nose and lets him sniff it. Ricard was drooling thinking; was this food or is it work. So when Marco put him on the command "search" Ricard went sniffing about the tank, found a trace, followed it and low and behold, found Bonkie in the chicken scoop. After barking that he had found what Marco was looking for, Marco went over and picked up Bonkie to put him back in the tank.
End of story. (Pheww!)
We are now contemplating to change our slogan into Marco's Farm :eerlijke heerlijke Vis, Fruit & Fikkies.

On Google Earth

To be or not to be.

We are there! On google earth in 3d when you download the plug in on this google earth page: http://earth.google.com/3d.html.

You can find us on latitude ; 12° 4'15.36"N and longtitude; 68°48'59.74"W. Or search us through google 3d warehouse: Marco's Farm BV

Have fun!

Escape artists

Red Claws are true escape artists. We knew this, so we took all kinds of precautions. We thought it wouldn't happen to us. Well today was the day. During our afternoon inspection we discovered one of our males went walkabout as the Australians call this.

When you find him please bring him back to us. You will find the location of our Farm on the map. After the escape we put the females in the next tank where we have one of our most active male breeders. I am sure he will be happy with his harem.

The remainder of the day we spent on checking the water quality in the tanks. Ronald is getting quite a hang of this. Dissolved oxygen levels are around 3 and the Ph is 7.5 in all tanks. Nitrate levels are very low and temperatures range between 26.5 and 29.8 degrees celsius depending on the location of the tanks. All is well!

Some of the water lillies we grow are in bloom and looking very radiant. So do the red peppers we are testing (which are actually still green) .

One Bob a day keeps the foliage away

There is someone who is very dear to me who has helped us out from the start and that is Bob, my father. He has been working like an ox the last few days. Before we could install all the new tanks some of the old ones had to be removed. Next to this some odd 40 trees (don't worry we have enough of them and these ones grow like cabbage) and numerous scrubs had to be removed. Bob ,who is 74 by the way, flew immediately in from Bonaire to help us out last week. He now works from dawn till dusk like he is obsessed. He just doesn't stop. sometimes we have to send him for his siesta, but he simply refuses and continues with his chores. He is happiest when we have the moment in the day when he can set fire to all the foliage we have removed. Obviously this adds enormously to the warmth that we already have here.luckily we have enough beer to keep him cool in the evenings! I honestly think Popeye found his master.

Ok and now what?

The most fun part of making our business plan was to decide on what fish we would breed.

They had to be economically viable and preferably not too difficult to breed. also we didn't want to select carnivorous fish species since those do not meet our criteria on sustainability. They eat more proteins than they deliver and when you have to get these proteins from the wild you are only contributing to the unbalance in nature.

After a thorough review we decided to concentrate on two species for now. Tilapias and Red claw lobsters.

The tilapia is one of the fish I already have experience with. Fortunately I have a number of great breeders. The question was more on where to get a first class line of Red Claws. Their home country is the state of Queensland in Australia but that was too far away.

Luckily a friend of mine in Miami, Dan from Miami Aqua-culture could help us out. A number of fantastic looking Red Claw breeders arrived safe and sound at our farm last week friday. Dan knew the timing was crucial for us since we needed the Red Claws before the new full moon. And we achieved that.

Today Ronald and I were very fortunate since we witnessed the Red Claw breeding ritual. And we think not many people have since info on this is hard to find on the net. After all the hard work of preparing the plan this was actually really something else. Tomorrow we will try to post some pictures of this.

Last week Saturday we also transferred the Tilapia breeders to their new tanks. Beautiful red colored ones ( well they are actually not red although they seem to be, but the skin of this species of Tilapia is actually transparent so the colour red comes from the inside of the fish) of almost one year old.

My partner and I also spent some time on redesigning the final lay out of the first phase of our farm. We are quite pleased with the end result for which we used Sketchup from Google. But you can judge for yourself when you look at the picture. This week we will also put it on Google Earth, just for fun.

The next weeks will be very busy with installing all the tanks. But for now; let the breeding begin!!

Houston, We Have Lift Off !

The sea and fish have always been part of my life. First of all because I was born on the beautifull island of Curacao, but also since I was fascinated by so much unknown life. The main part of my life I have dedicated to the Sea and Fish (and my family offcourse). First as a professional diver and later as a fish farmer.

Recently I met my business partner , Ronald. In the picture I am on the left and Ronald on the right.He is also into diving and fish.He came to me looking for an investment into aquaculture and aquaponics. After serious talks and some serious fun we decided to proceed with a feasibility plan.

The last half year we have been building our plans keeping in mind that we both want to achieve an organic way of small scale fish production, later followed by perhaps fruits and veggies. Not to become rich but just because we are both fascinated by what nature has to offer on our island. If we can find a way to do this in a sustainable manner and have fun whilst doing it, we will have succeeded.

We have decided to start this blog for ourselves as a sort of diary but also for our friends and family, so they can follow our activities and for other fish farming afficionados to share our experiences. Ronald will help me to manage the blog.

So today we finally have the beginning of our new venture together, Marco's Farm.
What a great day!