Make Money With Fish? 10 Things You Should Know About Breeding FISH For Profit
Like 4 Dislike 0 Published on 3 Mar 2019
It’s only natural when you’re passionate about something you want to take it to the next level and for allot of fish keepers that would be breeding fish.
Some fish keepers will breed fish for fun but allot of them like me will take it even further and breed fish for profit. This might seem like a great way to make a bunch of money real quick, well hold on a minute, let’s talk about that.
1. Business or just funding the hobby?
So you’ve decided to breed fish for profit meaning it’s your intention to breed fish, raise the fry up to a sellable size to then sell them and make a profit. Simple right?
Well before we get into specific details about breeding for profit we need to make a decision first, this decision is critical to how you’ll approach this whole thing and that is are you wanting to do this to support the hobby or do you want to start a business?
2. More work than you think
How many times have you heard people say things like “pssshhhh I could make a ton of money on YouTube, all you gotta do is make a video and put it up and get paid big money”
Or “Breeding fish is nothing, all you gotta do is put the fish in water and they do all the work”
Whether your talking about YouTube, Breeding fish or really anything for that matter pros are always gonna make things look much easier than they really are.
Unfortunately you don’t realize this until you try it for yourself.
3. Not as much money as you think
So the best way to talk about money in fish breeding is to give an example with a particular fish. Of coarse these numbers will be different depending on what kind of fish your breeding but for this example I’m gonna use a fish that we bred and sold a ton of in the past and that’s Albino Socolofi or snow white mbunas
4. How many tanks will you need?
Like John just said you’re gonna need several different tanks and several different sizes depending on what type of fish you’re breeding.
You’re gonna need breeding tanks, fry tanks and grow out tanks.
5. Where do you get breeder fish?
If you’re breeding for profit you want to create the best product possible and to get the best fry you need to start with the best breeder fish.
Whether you’re breeding African Cichlids that breed in groups, south and central American cichlids that breed in pairs or live bearers you want to start out with breeders that you know will give you the best results, but how do you know where to get these?
Well this is where you need to look around and talk to as many people as possible.
6. How long does it take for fish to be sellable size?
How long does it take for fish to be big enough to sell is one of the most common questions when it comes to breeding fish.
The answer to that question is, well, it depends.
It depends on what type of fish you’re breeding, your set up, how much you feed them and how well you’re taking care of them.
7. How will you get rid of the fish?
There are tons of options when it’s time to get rid of your fish. If you’re just starting out and getting things going you can start off with simple ads on craigslist or you can offer them up to your local fish store but just like everything else there’s a few things to think about.
First is you’ll make more money on each fish if you sell direct to the fish keeper. I’m not saying rip them off, I’m just saying you can get retail price or at least close to it selling direct.
If you go to your local fish store and offer to sell them fish you have to understand they’re not gonna pay you more than what they would pay their current supplier.
8. Culling
Unfortunately if you’re gonna breed fish culling is something that’s part of the deal. Culling is getting rid of less desirable fish, it’s sad but in allot of cases it has to be done.
Why you would cull fish is something that would be different from breeder to breeder but it could be birth defects or even 2 fish spawning that weren’t supposed to do it which resulted in hybrids.
9. Best fish to breed
There’s several different schools of thought when it comes to what are the best fish to breed.
If you’re doing this as a business you’ll want to breed fish that are easy to breed, produce allot of fry and most importantly are easy to get rid of.
10. Bottom line
I know it might seem like allot of what we’ve been saying has been on the negative side and I can assure you that’s not how it was intended.
Lisa and I have both said multiple times that some of the most fun we’ve ever had as fish keepers was when we had 127 tanks in our garage full of fish.