Tilapia Farm

Our Ghana team ‘regulars’ have also started a new adventure into fish farming! This will be a for-profit business endeavor in which a handful of our regular trip attenders have all chipped in and will share various percentages of the profit. The owner of the hotel that we stay at in Asikuma provided the land for our fish farm which we have named: 2 FISH 5 LOAVES. :) The land sits on the Lake Volta which is about a 20 minute car ride from Asikuma. Once you get to the water entry it is then a 10 minute boat ride to reach the land where our farm will be.

Loading the tools onto the boat and getting ready to set sail (the guy in the striped shirt off to the right is New Life - the owner of the hotel we stay at)…

Approaching the land…

Here is the view once you are standing on our 2 acres of fish farm land, looking back out to the lake.

Beautiful scenery at dusk…

This trip Chris and Dan spent each day out at the fish farm site constructing the storage units which will hold fish food, nets, and supplies.

Day 2:

Chris fell in love with this little guy named Prince who lives about 200 feet from our fish farm land in a little grouping of mud huts called Klager Village.

Always lots of curious onlookers…

Day 3:

Day 4:

Day 5:

So lots of progress over the week! As you could see from the pictures, once again we’ve been able to employ a lot of the locals to help with the construction aspects. We will also be hiring a handful of locals as full-time employees as the farm gets up and running. The storage units built during this trip will also house the security guard for the site as well as our site manager.

From this point the cages for the fish are being built by a supplier in Ghana. Each of our tripsters who have a share in the fish farm have contributed to buy 78,000 fingerlings (minnows that become tilapia) from a supplier in Ghana. Once the cages are ready they will be installed about 300 feet off-shore. Then each of the cages will be stocked with the fingerling. Right now the target stock date is May 10th. The fingerlings will be dispersed into 7 cages where they will need to be fed 3 times per day by our ‘feeder’ employee. The fish will grow from about 5 grams up to 500 grams. One of our other employees will be a ‘diver’ who will be responsible for clearing the nets from prevalent predators in these waters like this tiger fish that will try to bite through the nets and get themselves some dinner…

(Yikes!) If all goes as planned, we are leaning towards our first fish harvest being in October of this year. The starting of this fish farm is such a reminder to me that God has given us all different talents, gifts, interests and passions here in Ghana. There is certainly something for everyone on our trips! I know the business minds in our group are especially excited to get this new project rolling and see where it ends up….which just might be here…...