 Welcome back to the YouTube channel, it's your favourite village boy Mr Ghana baby and I've always been telling you guys that agriculture is the future and I'm not gonna stop talking about this until I see the youth of Africa investing in agriculture I am a farmer, I'm not a fisherman but I keep on telling you guys that the things that we overlook those are the things that can earn us more money I mean most of you are telling me that we don't have enough money to invest into real estate we don't have enough money to invest in industries in Africa but I want to tell you that you have enough money to invest in a farm and this is why I brought this episode which is titled teaching you how to what farm in Africa with a little amount of money I'm not saying it's all about going to the farm to weed it's all about investing a little amount of money do petty things surrounding you that will earn you more money and that is why I'm bringing you a new episode this episode is not about only interviewing young Africans I can interview anyone I mean anyone who has something to teach you so that the 1000 Ghana city that you have the 1000 dollars that you have in your pocket you can use it to invest in something meaningful surrounding you my name is Mr Ghana baby come with me 10 minutes episode and I'm going to see you as soon as I'm done don't forget to like the video subscribe and be part of this awesome family 2 million this year I'll see you all I saw you on the internet and I had to come and look for you but on the internet when I read your profile you told me you're Kenyan yes yes I'm a Kenyan you're Kenyan? yes I'm born third generation Kenyan third generation of Indian origin you speak Swahili? yes I speak Swahili I don't know what even I'm saying man jeez man my Swahili is so bad I don't know what the legend himself is it's a pleasure meeting you and I have the reason why I came to see you today is like I realized that you're doing something new something different I'm trying to inspire so many young Africans to invest in Africa with a little amount of money and that's what led me to your house so this is where you live yes this is where I live this is my backyard and you can see I have fresh fish coming right from my backyard you're doing everything at your backyard this is my backyard and this is the concept we want to develop because because of urbanization a lot of people are moving to cities and they don't have huge trucks of land to put up ponds so we are trying to encourage urban aquaculture in your backyard you know what I know when it comes to fish farming I mean the ones that are visited I mean it's huge it can take the whole area but you're just doing it right at your backyard yes yes yes and this is biofloc technology now what you see them doing in huge ponds I'll explain to you in a huge pond if it is unmanaged from an acre of land and a pond on an acre of land when you have not managed your pond you can get around 6 to 8 tons of fish from that one acre with my technology if you put it on one acre you will get more than 70 tons of fish that is the difference you said my technology I mean this technology is not my technology this technology was actually developed in the US and in Israel way back in the 1990s and it is used a lot in other countries especially in Asia whereby they need to bring down the cost of production because everything is very highly competitive so they need to bring down the cost of production so they use a lot of this technology to produce more at a lower cost you know what we are in Ghana before you take us to go and see what you are doing you are in Ghana right now but you said you are born in Kenya third generation what brought you to Ghana then I came to Ghana initially I used to work for a bank and then I stopped that and I started my own manufacturing of tarpaulin so we manufacture the tarpaulin one of the products we manufacture is the tarpaulin tanks for the fish you manufacture right here in Ghana yes we manufacture in Ghana we produce them in Ghana and then after the tarpaulin decided to so when I had the tarpaulin and I saw that there is a need to bring in this technology and because I was trained also in this technology in India in biofloc I decided to now try and introduce this technology using our tanks you can also do cement tanks but those are a bit more expensive this is cheaper and we want to try and bring down the cost of production as much as possible I am here because so many Africans that watch me especially the young ones are saying that it's so expensive to invest in Africa how much do you think it will cost us to I mean invest in this type of technology okay for this type of technology for example this is a 3 meter diameter tank because I don't have a lot of space but the basic commercial size is a 4 meter diameter tank it can take 10,000 liters of water so that 10,000 liters of water can give you around 300 to 500 kilos of fish now depending on how you are harvesting if you are harvesting at say 300 grams you are talking of 1,600 tilapia from a 4 meter diameter tank from your backyard can we just go and check it out I don't know if you are willing to train people for me because that's the reason why I'm here how do we reach out to in terms if somebody want consultation or want to know how to do this in their backyard we have a website www.buyoflockafrika.com so you can reach us through the website our contacts and everything is there all the details are there so we have 4 services and products one is the training so we will be training people on this technology and in Sub Saharan Africa we will be the first trainers of this technology there are farms there is one in Malawi and one being set up in South Africa but those are big scale they are not for small scale farmers so we will be the first Africans to train Africans in Africa I love that the fact that he is stressing on Africa for Africans that's awesome you know what I just want to ask you a question you lived in Africa all your life born and raised in here what is that one thing that if you had a chance to change up in Africa what was that one thing it is these technologies that we meet in Africa and the people who have these technologies are not very happy to give them to us they want us to go for technologies like RAS which is the recirculating aquaculture system which is very expensive it's a white elephant so it's an expensive system to implement and also a very expensive system to run now when I'm talking of RAS I'm talking about the proper RAS where you have your bio filters you have mechanical filters you have UV all those sophisticated technologies I'm not talking about the technology where we take buckets and we put pebbles and we put some ceramic stones and we say that is RAS I'm not talking of that RAS I'm talking of the proper RAS that is a very expensive system and that is what people want us to use because that is a white elephant it is not going to work unless you are doing very high value fish because the cost of running that technology will not pay you when you harvest your fish so these are the kind of technologies that we need to bring to Africa for Africans to benefit from and that is my objective so this is profitable and sustainable what is your name once again my name is Silesh and like I said I'm a Kenyan based here in Ghana for the last few years just to give you a bit of perspective about the technologies so on one side of the spectrum we have the pond technology where you dig a pond and you leave your fish in that you will get around 5 to 6 tons per acre on the extreme side we have the RAS system Recirculating aquaculture system there you can get 50 plus kilos per cubic meter of water but the cost of implementing that technology is huge and is not really for anybody on a small scale to do this technology can give you around 30 to 50 kilos depending on your level of expertise and your training at a fraction of the cost of doing an RAS system and people can put this in their back here this you can even put inside your room because there is absolutely no smell as you can see one of the other benefits of this system again is you see because the protein is being generated in the system the microbial protein we recommend even that you use low protein feed now low protein feed what does that do it reduces the cost of feed so when people start taking this technology up and the feed producer start producing the low protein cost feed the cost of feed will come down so in addition to you saving on the amount of feed you are also saving on the type of feed because the protein content has reduced what that also does for the environment is because we get a lot of the protein from the oceans we are taking a lot of the fish from the oceans to convert into fish feed as fish meal so we will now reduce that pressure on the environment and use that fish for humans and then in this technology we reduce our consumption of fish protein the last benefit that I want to talk about is the health benefit this is organic fish when you eat organic things you become healthy so now if you look at the macro level when people stop falling sick the pressure on our health systems will also reduce so it has a macro benefit also in addition to the micro for the small people if you look at the economic benefits those are huge imagine if everybody has or maybe a thousand people in Ghana have this tank in their backyard and you are producing a ton of fish every six months or five months Ghana imports 250 million dollars worth of fish now we can shift that balance in our favor instead of importing we can now even become exporters of organic fish you understand so that is one benefit the children can benefit from good quality protein on one hand on the other hand this is a very scientific technology so what they learn in science they will apply it straight into this on a practical level and those children can then become aquaprenuers when they leave school they don't need to really pursue other courses they can go into aquaculture so we can grow that another area we can look at is even the prisons for example in this technology so by the time they come back to join society they are already skilled and they have ready jobs waiting for them you see if I take you to Kenya for example this is what I call an appropriate technology for Africa if you look at Kenya for example we started appropriate technology in agriculture as the green house in the 1960s so today Kenya exports a lot of horticulture products as well as flowers is one of the leading flower exporters in the world because we started then and if you look at the agronomists across the world and particularly in Africa they come from Kenya because they built the expertise over the years now Ghana with me here and with this technology we have that unique advantage that we can train our people so that by the time the other countries try and catch up with us we have a pool of experts who we can then export to the other countries so that is an advantage we have and this technology is the technology of the future it's the blue revolution in aquaculture and this is what people should adopt if they want to get profitable output and this can be used for any fish if it can work for tilapia you can use this for catfish with your eyes closed I don't know since you've been mentioning so many advantages what are the disadvantages of using this method I wouldn't call them disadvantages because they are no disadvantages they are only challenges so this system has a challenge the first and the most important challenge of this technology is the training training is extremely important you have to be properly trained because all this is based on scientific principles and you have to understand the scientific principles before you can manage the water so training is the most important thing second challenge is that it needs some preparation time so you don't just fill your water and bring fish and you put them inside it will not work you have to prepare the water you have to prepare the fish and then you can start and once you do that your mortality is almost zero you should not get any mortality so that is one of the challenges another challenge is electricity you must have constant electricity if especially you are doing tilapia even for catfish if you are doing catfish the system still needs aeration because you want to keep an aerobic environment you don't want anaerobic status you can use solar you can use any form of electricity but you have to have electricity and a backup so when lights go off you have to have your backup taking off okay but is it expensive to go for the training no training is not very expensive it's not expensive in that it's the most important thing so you can decide to go for this invest a lot of money and a lot of people have done that because they are trying to save that training cost so they invest a lot of money without going for training and then they end up failing so losing a lot of money you see training also once you go for the training and you understand the technology you will be able to know whether really that technology is for you or not for you because it needs some dedication you have to be able to check the parameters manage the parameters it takes a bit of your time say ten minutes every morning you need to spend on the time and you are fine, you are good to go so training is the most important because we make them ourselves we can make any size for you so if you want a five meter diameter tank you want ten meters, twenty meters whatever size you want we can make it for you in this now after this we are going to bring another technology for ponds this is for tanks, that is for ponds so where you have a pond and you already have and with that technology you will be able to increase your production by five to thirty times what you are currently doing so that technology we will bring it we will introduce it later I think for you guys to check it out if you want to enroll for the training and yeah it's more affordable and go learn it and start this wherever you are like I said this year I'm teaching you how to fish I mean the easiest way to fish with a little amount of money thank you so much for watching it's still your favourite village boy Mr. Gaena Baby and I'm going to see you in the next one