Shrimp intensive culture are now common practices in Thailand. Farmers are suspect whether using high inclusion of soybean meal will have side effects in term of growth, diseases, high mortality, etc. This experiment is shown that intensive shrimp culture by using different inclusion rate of soybean meal of 25%, 50% and 100% fishmeal replacement in feed formulation compare with normal commercial feed. USSEC and cooperator in this project want to do the comparison to see the result of the different feeds.
A comparative demonstration was conducted from May 2022 to August 2022 at a shrimp farm in
Trang province, Thailand. Total of four ponds with volume of 3,000 m3 in each pond will be used for the feeding demonstration. Three ponds will be used to demonstrate the effectiveness of different soybean inclusion levels, and another one pond will use a standard commercial feed as a control pond. Shrimp obtained from commercial hatchery and the post larvae will be acclimatized in cooperator’s nursery pond as needed before stocking into the grow-out ponds. The stocking density is 200,000 pcs/pond. The post larvae will be approximately 5.0 gram/piece at the time of stocking and will be grown to 25 gram/piece (40 pieces/kg) for 52-53 days of culture.
All four ponds were stocked on the same day after all ponds were properly prepared. All water parameters had no significant differences when they were stocked. The feeding was operated by auto feeding machines during 0600-1800 hrs.
All ponds were managed to be in normal condition and no major issue during the culture. However, total ammonia level was accidentally raised during the culture (table2) which resulted in lowering the growth at the late culture period.
The result of harvesting of 4 demonstration ponds (table 1&2) showed no significant difference between those 4 experimental groups in terms of growth, FCR, biomass and survival rate. This clearly indicated that feed formulation can use soybean meal to replace fishmeal without significant effect.