One of our dreams here in Thailand is to work with Thai people to develop Aquaculture in the Isaan region. We are praying and believing that this will be a way to bless Thai people in a visible way and also open up doors to be in relationship with the Thai as we rub shoulders with them, working side by side. Over the past weeks we have been doing just that with a guy named Jem who made a pond on his land available to grow fish from the "swim-up fry" stage to a slightly larger size (average 1 inch) during the process we mixed a hormone with the fish food to change the sex to male. That is so they grow bigger faster.
However, we didn't just set these fish free in the pond. We kept them in nets like the one in this picture so that predators wouldn't get them and so that we could easily take them out of the pond and count them to see what the survival rate was. Part of our purpose was to see how the fish survived on the long bus ride from the fish farm in Chiang Mai that we bought them from. If enough survived we thought we might buy and ship more fish from that farm in the future. So here we are counting fish. We don't actually count every one but estimate based on an average weight. Randy is Weighing the fish in the second picture.
The final result was a little less than 50% survival rate. That was less than we hoped for but we learned a lot and we now have some experience to draw from in the future. One thing was that it is difficult to find buyers for that size of fish. It would be better if we were able to grow them to a larger size. We ended up giving them away to two different villages. Which was fine. Hopefully these fish will be a blessing to many people and that they will help to extend our network of relationships.
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