Using MAX to plan feeding
xpertSea MAX is the best way to plan your farm’s feed, as it corrects for sampling error, while allowing you to simulate different feed plans based on target growth rates, instantaneously understanding the impact on achieving your harvest target. The insights from MAX help you feed more accurately, improving your FCR and overall profitability.
Setup
To use xpertSea MAX to plan the feed for your ponds, there are several easy things you need to ensure you have done beforehand:
Enter your feed table. While xpertSea provides a default table that you can use, it will be more useful if you enter the feed table that you use to plan for feed, as the recommendations will become even more tailored to your farm.
Complete monitoring(s) for the pond you want to plan. Once the monitoring is completed, simply click on the Plan Feed button from the home page.
Configure pond. In the settings page, define the type of feeding that you typically do at the farm (autofeeders vs. manual), or specifically at the pond level. This will allow for intelligent task generation once the feed plan has been set.
Once you have everything ready to go, simply head to the pond you want to feed, and navigate to the Feed planning tab to get started.
Step 1: Finalize Weight to Feed
The first step in deciding the feed to give, is getting an accurate view on the average body weight of the shrimp in the pond. While this may not seem like a choice being made today, it is a critical variable to get right as misestimating average body weight by only a few percentage points can lead to over or underfeeding by hundreds of KGs of food.
In the feed planning section of xpertSea MAX, up to three values of body weight are provided including a recommended value to help you best plan your feed. First is the xpertSea’s predicted value for the last sample, and the second is the last sample’s value.
There are several reasons why these values may differ, and the most likely are the following:
Bad image quality: If the shrimp in the image taken cannot be well detected by the computer vision, it can lead to xpertSea giving an erroneous result.To learn more about common issues with photos, check out our blog post on how to take good photos.
Bad sample: If the sample taken from the pond is not representative, you may get a bad result. To learn more about why sample error occurs, why it’s important, and how MAX helps solve it, check out our other blog post on that topic.
In both cases, you can either manually override the value, or take another sample.
Additionally, there could be a third weight value that appears if you are planning your feed on a day where a monitoring was not completed, as the shrimp have grown since you last monitored, so the predicted weight at that point in time is provided.
Step 2: Finalize Survival Rate
xpertSea MAX helps calculate what the survival rate of your pond is through three different methods:
by feed consumed
by population / lances
by survival table.
The most accurate method is typically using the feed consumed, which works by taking the average weight in the pond, doing a reverse look up on the feed table, then calculating the biomass. However, it can be useful to compare all three methods to choose the best number.
Step 3: Establish desired growth and simulate plan
Most farms have a growth rate they desire to grow each week, but it is difficult to know where they will end up at harvest time and if they are trending well. In this section, you can quickly simulate how a different growth rate will result in different feed amounts and different results at harvest.
Note: If too much feed is given it can lead to many problems in the pond. It is important to not overfeed, which is why we provide a ceiling with a farm level configured value of the maximum growth rate. Additionally, while you may plan to feed aggressively, it is still very important to make daily adjustments based on the results of the day’s feeding and how much is leftover.
Step 4: Add Special Instructions
Including special instructions for the team related to feeding is a frequent need, and can be quite critical. When included in MAX, the field team will see this through the mobile app in their task list. Several things can be configured through MAX, including:
Feed pellets: Using the xpertSea MAX histogram and recommendations, you can confidently set the right size and type of feed to give to your pond by seeing the exact breakdown of how much biomass you have in each pellet size.
Protocol: When manually feeding, there are typically multiple feeding events throughout the day. You can communicate the percentage of feed to be given at each feeding event quickly and easily through this section in MAX.
Medication: When a pond needs bacteria or other nutrients added to the feed to be given to the pond, it can be included in this section so that it is communicated to the team.
Other special instructions: MAX provides recommendations for this section based on the other information we have in the platform, but this could include things like changing the feeding zones, changing the timing of when feed is given, and more.
Step 5: Finalize feed plan, automatically generate tasks and send to team
After saving the changes to the feed plan, feed tasks will be automatically generated and available for your team members to view. They can then fulfill these tasks and report additional data back, such as the results of the pond bottom monitoring. The feed plan can be accessed by all team members within the platform, and can also be downloaded or printed.
Making Adjustments to the Plan
Once the plan has been set, adjustments to the plan can be made in two ways: one day at a time, or fully replanning a pond.
First off, it is more common to make minor adjustments mid-week to the next day’s feed to be given. Using the information reported back from the field team in the mobile app such as feed consumed, mortalities, and more, it is easy to have a quick view on the results of the day’s events, and how the pond is eating. Using this information, adjustments to the amount of feed to be given tomorrow, or any changes to the special instructions can be made.
However, if there is new information that comes in or significant amounts of feed leftover then it may be better to re-plan the feed. This can be done at any point in time by simply going to the feed planning section, however it is recommended to get a new monitoring on the day which you can replan your feed to ensure you have the most recent information when doing the planning.
To learn more about how to get the most out of xpertSea MAX and use it to plan feed, contact your xpertSea representative or reach out to us at info@xpertsea.com.
