About 25 people visited the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff Aquaculture/Fisheries Center, Planters Cotton Oil Mill and the University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service on Tuesday as part of Farm Tour 2015: Fish, Fields and Yields.
The farm tour, organized by the Pine Bluff Regional Chamber of Commerce, highlights agriculture and business interests. Participants, who this year included the current Leadership Pine Bluff class from the chamber, tour local facilities.
Ganesh Kumar is a research associate in economics at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff and showed the group the UAPB fisheries program ponds. They are called split ponds because one half contains fish and the other half contains their waste.
“The fish live in a more comfortable zone,” Kumar said. “This is one of the most adaptive technologies. At UAPB we are doing experiments on the costs of having split ponds. This half-acre pond has about 7,000 hybrid catfish.”
Farmers know how to reduce costs because they do not want to spend money unnecessarily, Kumar said. Equipment separates the split ponds but the equipment is expensive, Kumar said.
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“We are optimizing [our methods] to see how much water should be pushed out,” Kumar said.
There is a lot of risk associated with split ponds, Kumar said, citing equipment malfunctioning, human error or human tardiness.
“Labor is costly,” Kumar said. “We feed the fish once per day. It is all about labor optimization.”
The tour offered an opportunity for people to ask questions to the university faculty members.
UAPB Associate Director of Aquaculture Fisheries Center of Excellence Anita Kelly discussed the ecosystem. The program attracts many students who grew up on farms and many students from other nations.
UAPB Extension Aquaculture Specialist Matthew Recsetar gave a tour of an aquaponics greenhouse. The word “aquaponics” indicates the plants do not grow in soil but rather from nutrients obtained from fish waste. He discussed the growth of vegetables and the relationship among various insects.
At Planters Cotton Oil Mill, President John Fricke and chief financial officer Teresa McMillan discussed the history of cotton plants, the components of the plants and their uses. Cotton plant products are used in clothing, cosmetics, computers and cushions.