Last year, Daily Trust traced the farm of a young Nigerian who is using local waste materials to produce fish feed.

Peter Ododa, passionate about fish and poultry farming, uses his talent to locally manufacture fish feeds, using what he calls \"local materials.\" Ododa has now decided to commercialize his locally made feeds.

The New Life Farm Agriculture Nigeria Limited, as his farm is known, has recently launched floating fish feed, produced mainly from local materials, into the Nigerian market.

When I started fish farming, I was finding it difficult with their feeds. Whenever I buy foreign feeds, I discovered that I was losing instead of gaining. So I started buying corn and groundnut but still found that the cost of feeding the fishes was still high. So I carried out some investigations to ascertain if rejected bread, rice bran, crayfish, corn and cake, among others can feed the fishes.

\"I further discovered that extracts from guinea corn, chicken dung when assembled with other things all have nutritious value for the fishes, help you have very good feeds which you can feed your fishes with cheaply and also sell to other people.\"

Ododa appealed to the federal government to empower farmers with loans to help them expand their farms as a means of creating employment.

The fish farmer said Nigeria has resources that are being wasted instead of getting harnessed. He said rice bran, for instance, which can generate employment for the youth used to be burnt in places where rice is cultivated.

[Source: Vincent A. Yusuf And Ojoma Akor, All Africa. Read article]