http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/us/11fish.html

It's way too cold in Florida for the tropical fish industry. Thankfully guppies and mollies, platys, etc... should come back fast.

yeah i live here in Tampa and it has been incredibly cold lately and there is no economical way to heat those ponds either because im betting they are 2-300+g ponds each so each one would need 2-3 of he largest heaters they could find and most of these fish farms have 100+ ponds

Well, it's either heat the ponds or watch them die. If they're not making any efforts to heat even a small amount of the ponds, which they clearly aren't, then they shouldn't be complaining. It's their fault and theirs alone that they thought that nature was a static entity, and it's a real shame that the farmed fish are the ones that have to suffer due to the farmer's lack of foresight. The fact that they'll be getting some kind of bailout or subsidy due to their lack of preventative measures is only going to compound this issue in the future.

I thought we were having global warming. Now we are having an ice age?

That's why they added in the "climate change" bs, but that's a volatile argument for the lounge since global warming is now a faith-based religion that no one likes questioned. Same with the ice age hysteria in the 70's...

saw an interview on the news tonight from a 'tropical fish farmer'....hes estimating he has lost 70% of his stock

my mom who used to keep horses just told me they make these stock heaters i think she called them that are used to heat up the water in horse troughs. now a couple of these in each pond would be an incredible plan for these tropical fish farmers

How do you compare a horse trough to a 500,000 gallon pond? I would imagine heating that much water would be a little cost prohibitive.

I would imagine the cost of losing that many fish would be even worse.

Doubt it

uumm have you ever looked at pictures of a tropical fish farm? they are a bunch of 5-600 gallon ponds not one large 500,000g pond







and the tropical fish industry is a $49million a year industry for FL so im pretty sure the cost of the heaters would be cost efficient for them

Dude, did you read that article or look at the title of the thread? Have YOU ever actually seen a fish farm? I have.

It takes 8.34 BTUs to raise a gallon of water 1 degree. 1 btu = .00244kWh. .00244kWh x 500,000 = 1222kWh to raise the pond 1 degree. Now lets say you want it up 5 degrees, you're at 6110kWr. Now lets assume a power rate of $0.10/kWh. You have $611 to raise one pond 5 degrees. Multiply that by 80, $48,880 to raise the water temp 5 degrees on your farm. That is just once, and it doesn't count the fact that the 30 degree air is constantly pulling out heat all night. That is just the power bill, and that take into account heaters that are 100% efficient.

You'd have to lose a lot of guppies to justify that.

The most efficient way I've seen to control the temperature of this much water is to pump it through a heat exchanger hooked up to a residential Heat Pump (the outdoor half of a typical Air Conditioning split-system). This is what the outdoor Aquaculture Facility at the local University does.

The local Aquarium has heat exchangers tied into their Chiller/Boiler piping.

i live in FL and i have seen those farms before. now i will conceed those ponds are a bit bigger than my guestimate but they are nowhere near your half a million gallon estimate which was never stated anywhere in that article. those ponds at best are 2 feet deep so id say they hold about the same amount of water as 2 regular size inground pools which are able to be heated to the 70s and higher most of the year. now if they want to go high tech install a pool heater or 2 to each pond now this wont be cost efficient this year but if this keeps happening it will pay for itself with saved fish. now you did all your math but you have to count in the fact that they are losing an estimated half of their fish which drops their income from almost $50,000,000 to $25,000,000 now i dont know about you but i would be willing to spend $5million to save $25million worth of profits

and they arent only losing guppies they are losing very expensive fish

I don't want to argue numbers with you, but no fish farm is making $50mil. It's a farm, just like any other, no one is getting filthy rich off of this. And those ponds are a lot bigger than 2 in ground pools. Here's a fish farm, tell me thats not a lot of water http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source...mp;t=h&z=17

Bottom line is that if it was cheaper than losing those fish they would have done it. I've lived in Florida for all of my years and I can't ever remember a winter like this one. That is the reason these farms are having the problem, it only gets this cold every 20 years. The last time we had a winter like this was 89.

larger bodies of water cool slower i would think. They could put a tarp or something black over the pond to capture heat and prevent air circulation as well

yes as a whole they may have the water you mentioned i was talking about each individual pond. also yes it has gotten way colder than i ever remember here in FL and i hate it lol

If it's not cost effective to raise the temp of those ponds at least a few degrees to keep the fish alive, then why the hell would the fish hobby exist and why would people have heaters in their tanks? It would be a rich mans hobby at that point. Yes you have some numbers but throw a little bit of thought and common sense into it. You also don't have all the numbers or accurate numbers, they're guesses.

i live in so florida and the reason why noone has heaters in the ponds is that it hasnt been this cold in over 20 years. noone thinks it can get this cold down here. not only the ponds are having die off but the everglades as well. peacock bass and cichlids are floating around everywhere. snook and redfish are dying off in the salt marshes too.

The most cost effective way to do it would be a gas-fired boiler piped out to heat exchangers at each pond. It could also have a chiller or a cooling tower for cooling during the extremely hot months. It's a standard HVAC 2-pipe system with pond water instead of process water.

Another idea that'd be a little more upfront cost, but it would save the gas and the cost of running the equipment would be a geothermal loop piped/pumped to the heat exchangers. This would provide heat in the winter and cooling in the summer. I need to quit blabbering ideas on the internet and start trying to contact some fish farmers...

49 million is a collective number gathered by all of the companies farming fish. Each opperation is indivudually owned.

I trust that as a business decision they looked at the cost to purchase heaters large enough as a just in case. Because they "never" need them they made the decision not to. It was like buying earthquake insurance in Wisconsin, I passed.

when the farmers in california get hit with another freeze, or a forest fire should they be left with nothing?

the cost to heat these farms would have been immense....these things are huge.....

Realistically, they'll all claim it on insurance anyway. If you really want to look at the numbers, to lose this many fish once every...20 years, you would profit more from claiming insurance than you would save from buying heat. That's the truth of it. Like swerving because some idiot comes into your lane, then going off road and hitting something. You're better off going ahead and hitting the idiot, then it's not considered your fault.

I do still stand by my arguement though if you take insurance out of the picture, that it would be better if they heated even some of the ponds instead of losing the fish.

is ORA okay?

They (the one that I read about) didn't have the farms insured, too expensive. They can only write off the 'loss' on taxes.

insuring inventory that large gets very expensive, most will save the cost and use it as capitol to grow or sustain the business.

That's a good question, I heard it got really cold down there for a few days (sub 30 at night). They are close to the river so it will keep the air a little warmer, but not much. They may have some temprature controls on their water though since from what I've seen everything is in smaller tubs in greenhouses and as we all know corals don't like a lot of swinging temps.

I still think a lot of people don't realize the amount of raw energy it would take to heat the ponds of a fish farm. That combined with the investment in pumps and heaters that you use once every 20 years just doesn't make sense economically.

Like I was saying you don't heat those amounts of water with plug-in electric heaters. You use heat-exchangers. It's not as expensive as the calculations in this thread lead one to believe.

It's 8.3 BTUs to heat 1 gallon of water 1 degree, sure, but a BTU isn't much. The heat pump on a small house/large apartment puts out 30,000 BTU per hour (And that's just a standard little residential heat pump, a few thousand dollars, the big ones aren't much more.), that would heat 3750 gallons 1 degree. All you have to do is maintain the heat, you don't wait until the water is 40* to turn the heat on. It's called a setpoint, just like the thermostat in your house. It doesn't wait until the house is 57* to heat it back up to 65. It kicks on when the temp reads 64*.

There are ways to do it without using pure electric heat. Plus if they were smart about it they could use the same exact system to cool the water. I would think stable water temperatures, regardless of the livestock, would produce better crops and justify the cost.

Somebody that gets it. Is it just me or should this really fall under common sense?

how much heat would it take to run a small fish farm, that was say only 1.2 million gallons? So a really small one in this case.

- Maybe I overestimated the cost to run the heaters, but i think you overestimate how much money these guys are sitting on....I assure you none of the dozen fish farmers I am friends with can afford it. These guys are far more like the "family farmers" we think of when we think of farming, rather than the corporate powerhouses that do most farming and would have gotten the crop freeze money and a subsidy to boot in a heartbeat. (After the price of their remaining product went through the roof of course).

mother natures way of getting rid of fish that dont belong there....

oh wow...I didnt even think of it! DO you think the exotics in the IRL and everywhere else took a hit? That would be sweet, would be nice to have bass again instead of Jack Dempseys

Have a friend that own a small lfs.can't get any feeder guppies now and only have the feeder goldfish.price are already going up from suppiers that gets passed on the store owner then us.Friend told there my be a price incerse in plants to because some are raised the same way.Thank god i'm switching over to sw.

getting into the reefing hobby is a good way to save some money inkman, no denying that.

Yeah.. i'm more concerned about the 10's of thousands of snook that died.

I'm more concerned about these apparently dirt poor farmers that lost their "crop" because they can't afford to prepare for something like this. How are they going to feed their families? Their lives are ruined.

So much for our tomatoes and other crops also... people in Haiti have it worse.

it happened too, did you see inshore waterways the day after? it was bad....lookdowns, pinfish, snappers, lots of juvies...



+1

I have friends that are too poor or probably short sighted to afford car insurance, but drive anyway. Personally I wouldn't drive without insurance, but they've done the cost/benefit analysis on the possibility of accidents and choose to drive anyway. These farmers knew the chances of a deep freeze were remote, and made the active decision to proceed without safeguards. Honestly I don't think them being poor or not had much to do with that decision at the time, it just wasn't an insurance that they wanted to have. At the time.

edit - To be fair, I'd have made exactly the same decision by the way.

How much is fish inventory insurance?

what alot of people dont understand is that these freshwater fish are not $30 cost like our saltwater fish. These are pennies. They make their $$ in bulk. The farmers have been covering their ponds and it still is not enough to keep them warm. I dont think alot of you know what the process is to actually get the fish out of the pond. You literally sort all the fish by hand. Some even use tranquilizers so the fish are immobile and easy to count and sort. I have been to over 30 different fish farms and worked at 4 of them. These farmers arent rolling in the $$. you have to think about their total cost. Running a farm takes $$. You also have to take into consideration that even using heat exchangers you will be fighting the temperature of the ground at the same time. Its like having a chiller and a heater running at the same time.

Even with my arguing, I have to agree with organism. In all honesty, I would have done the same thing as well. The reason for arguing is the same reason people on here argue about putting a tang in a nano. Can it be done yes. Should it be done no. Same reasoning with the farms not being properly equipped. Can it be done yes, will it raise the price of their stock? slightly. Is it something that should have been done...YES. Hindsight is a #####.

Mother nature is a #####.. she always kicks ass.

you also have to understand that even .10 difference in a fish will have your buyers go somewhere else.

the farmers need to find a spring and tap it, thats the most efficient way to keep water quality and temps constant. the farm i worked at does it and even in the coldest days when all other ponds and lakes are iced over, the hatchery ponds are steaming. thats the most efficient way to maintain warm and stable conditions.

Yeah you're right, and I wouldn't be surprised if someone like ORA had a system like this so they could also fight the heat in the summer. That said, this whole thing is about large freshwater ponds. Ok a standard little heat pump for a house can raise the temp of 3750 gallons, that's not much. We are talking millions of gallons for a normal size farm. The whole point here is that the capital to invest in heaters, piping, and pumps for something that happens once every 20 years just doesn't make sense or they would be doing it.

My family has orange groves in the same area as this article is about. It usually might freeze a time or two, and barely freeze at that. So when something like this winter rolls around they turn on the sprinklers at the grove and hope for the best. Yeah sure they could get some giant heaters and pay for the fuel to run them, but it just doesn't make sense to pay that much money for something that rarely happens.

Farmers know the risk and if they are smart they have a plan to deal with losses. And if you think anyone is getting rich running a farm of any sort you're sadly mistaken. A few might, but they are giant farming corporations, Duda comes to mind.





You got a point there.

This is a cost benefit decision for them. Factoring in a 50 year event versus the carrying cost of insurance or heaters (of any ilk) against the restocking/rebuilding costs. In reality this is a pretty simple sort of economic equation and at the end they've collectively decided to go without and restock/build after these 50 year events. You actually see similar economic models after earthquakes in places like CA, although quake insurance is required. In a macro sense, after factoring the rebuilding costs not offset by insurance in CA they still have a gigantic net positive. otherwise they wouldn't continue to build and live there. Societies are pretty good at risk/reward equations even as individual people may not be.

Remember back to the last big freeze in FL.. It killed more than half the orange groves. Everyone was concerned that was the end of the orange juice industry in FL. for the same reasons. Look where they are now.

"An insurance", as in the heater "wasn't an insurance that they wanted to have. At the time."