Selling fish at a farmers market

Very simple, find the closet china town near you. Deal in cash and u don't have to worry about any rules or regs. If you go to any real Asian market that sells fish they have live fish tanks. China town in Boston and New York is amazing!

I approves.

IF you wake at midnight, and hear a horse's feet,
Don't go drawing back the blind, or looking in the street,
Them that ask no questions isn't told a lie.
Watch the wall my darling while the Gentlemen go by.

That sounds like a plan. You can suggest to them that they set up an aquarium so people can see they have fresh fish. They don't need but a few fish in the water to sell the idea.

Carp, which goldfish and koi are, are easy to grow.

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Nothing is as strong as gentleness, nothing so gentle as real strength - St. Francis de Sales

If you can legal grow carp and without risking an introduction downstream you could grow them in your settling ponds. They grow really fast and are able to eat a lot of different things.

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"Do you believe in the devil? You know, a supreme evil being dedicated to the temptation, corruption, and destruction of man?" Hobbs
"I'm not sure that man needs the help." Calvin

The following article is a couple of years old but I thought you might find it interesting. The article is about a fish farmer in Idaho that can barely keep up with the demand for live fish delivered to the customers. It sounds like if you wanted it to it could turn into a very profitable business for you and there isn't too much local competition.

The big tilapia shown in the pond in the picture sure are beautiful, healthy looking fish.

http://magicvalley.com/lifestyles/fo...a4bcf887a.html

There are no Chinatowns anywhere near southern Idaho. The closest large metro area is SLC about a 4 hr. drive, no Chinatown and it is illegal to possess live tilapia in Utah.
There is a big Mexican food market in my town, I'll take them some samples too.
I could get a permit to grow carp without much problem but a colleague is a commercial fisherman and fish farmer, he caught 5,500 lbs of carp last week. He is going out again tomorrow and expects to catch 7,000 more lbs. No need to raise carp around here. I could bring them to the farm and purge them in a 20' circular with clean water for a week or two and have a high quality product. I'll try to get something going with the tilapia first and then, who knows?

I want to raise tilapia in Kansas. Wonder if it could be done. I live in Bel Aire which is very close to Wichita which is the biggest city in Kansas at 400k people.

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Ted H

You may all go to Hell, and I will go to Texas.
-Davy Crockett

Purging should make a difference if you have clean holding water. A lot of off tastes are purged by holding fish in fresh water. It's a common practice for catfish farms to harvest and then do a taste test. If the fish are "off" they go into clean water for a fixed period of time and are then marketed.

__________________
"Do you believe in the devil? You know, a supreme evil being dedicated to the temptation, corruption, and destruction of man?" Hobbs
"I'm not sure that man needs the help." Calvin

Here in New England wholesale cost for live tilapia 1lb fish on average is $3.30 lb.

I have given Tilapia some thought in the last couple of years...Getting a local butcher to custom fillet and package them would be a way to get around the regs... advertise a package.... for so much a pound picked up from the butcher similar to beef halves and pork etc...

We have a rabbit butchering plant near here... they run 6 days a week... But on Thursdays they will do farm raised fowl, etc... they butcher for some of the grass raised farmers around here...
There are some good DIY videos on U T on the subject.... also you need not gut them.... you can fillet most any fish by filleting down to the tail, leaving the skin in tact, and the fillet the meat off the skin... no scales, no mess, clean and quick... thats how we do our crappie, bass, bream ect..

If you want to make money you need to sell them live. Tilapia is one of the most inexpensive fish out there, it is imported from China by the millions of lbs. fresh product is flown In daily from Costa Rica. Please don't give me that you wouldn't eat something from china story, the farms they have over there growing these tilapia are some of the most massive and impressive state of the art aquaculture businesses you can not even imagine.

I think you are on the right tract buying your friend's carp and reselling. You could corner the market on fish in the store you are talking to now. Work with them for a couple of months to get your business kinks worked out, and if that restaurant doesn't buy enough from you, find a second.

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Nothing is as strong as gentleness, nothing so gentle as real strength - St. Francis de Sales

I took 45 lbs of 1.5 to 2.5 lb tilapia into the store on Saturday. They were still flopping when I poured them from my barrel into their tote. They looked so much better than what was in their freezer, there is no comparison. I told them this first batch is free, if they want more, I want $2.00/lb. They were trying to sell their "product of China" tilapia for $2.19/lb they were about 3/4 lb each.
I'm optimistic at this point, but if it doesn't work out then I'll try the Farmers Market when it starts up in a month or so.

Let's see some pictures!

This is (unfortunately) very true.

It doesn't go for just fish. Beef, chicken, pork ... in many rural and depressed areas there's just no market for the higher end, organic, locally-raised product.

Partly because those areas are economically depressed, but also because the people there don't have a taste for it. That pasture beef may remind some old geezer of the "good ol' days when he was a boy", but he's on a fixed income now and it's been 60 years since he had it. All that while he's eating ground hamburger from Walmart.

You'd be lucky if you got $2 a dozen for fresh eggs in my community. Most people can't taste the difference between farm fresh eggs and storebought ones, and if they can taste the difference then they prefer the blander store eggs. Plus, you've got the hard fact that anyone who DOES prefer the farm fresh eggs has their own chickens.

I'd think tilapia was one of those products that's just hard to differentiate for the layman. I can certainly taste the difference between a catfish I caught and a catfish I bought, but I've never even seen a whole tilapia. If you dumped one out on the table in front of me flopping, I wouldn't be able to tell you more than "that's a fish".

Since he's selling the fish to a restaurant, the end consumer isn't going to get a flopping fish, he's going to get dinner.

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Nothing is as strong as gentleness, nothing so gentle as real strength - St. Francis de Sales

But then we're does the Restuarant have an advantage buying it alive. The last thing a restaurant wants to do is start butchering a live tilapia in his kitchen, what a pain in the B that would be + the mess it would make. Ha

I thought it was an Asian grocery store, not a restuarant.

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Push, Pull or get Out of the Way

I must have missed the part about the restaurant somewhere in this epic thread, but yeah ... I'd think the same thing.

First, it's got to be a fairly upscale restaurant. You aren't selling live tilapia to the Cracker Barrel.

Second, restaurant chefs are NOTORIOUS for changing their mind. You may get a year out of one chef in a contract, then he'll be gone and it'll be a new chef who doesn't want your fish ... after you've built up infrastructure and accrued costs.

I don't really have any advice for how to cope with that though.

Here's another idea for you. Sell the fish live for $4.00 per pound to people to stock into farm ponds. There are a lot of people that are serious about fish ponds. Stocking Tiliapia into a farm pond in the spring does several things, it provides lots of baby Tiliapia for the bass to eat and the adult Tiliapia eat algae to help keep it from growing in the pond. Here's the best part, they die each winter so you don't have to worry about them over populating the pond and they need to buy new fish each season. Check out pondboss.com there are a lot of people that do this every year for their ponds. Just another idea for you.