Pity the thousands of expensive tropical fish who died along the way as a Singapore family tried to figure out fish-farming.
Oh, yes, and Yap has just published a business book on the management lessons he's learned from fish-farming, each chapter starring a different variety of fish he raises.
But what really separates Qian Hu from the many mom-and-pop businesses of the tropical-fish-farming industry is the attention paid to safely shipping such a fragile creature to customers overseas.
It's always hard to say how much this kind of personal branding contributes to the success of a business, especially one like fish-farming that's easy to enter but hard to master.
"Fish-farming on a local basis exists throughout Southeast Asia, but to become a global presence a firm must overcome this obstacle, " says Gerald Bassleer, managing director of the industry's trade group, the Ornamental Fish International in the Netherlands.
Which is a shame, because the U.S. has the largest federal water zone in the world, with more ocean area suitable for deep-water fish farming than the country has arable land area.
FORBES: Regulatory Uncertainty Drives A Fish Farmer To Foreign Waters
In practice, they provide cheap labour (mainly from Asia) for the garment industry, farming and fish-processing.
To provide jobs and stop their children leaving the land, they want government support to develop agro-industrial projects, such as fish and fruit farming and market gardening, says Ilda de Souza, leader of a co-operative there.
Both oenophiles and salmon lovers can see which vineyards are taking action via Fish Friendly Farming, a certification project from the non-profit and Napa-based California Land Stewardship Institute, which gives its stamp of approval to wineries and farms that work on habitat and water-quality issues.
And recently, researchers in aquaculture (fish farming) have discovered that cottonseed meal makes a high-quality fish food.18 Catfish, in particular, appear to love cottonseed meal, and will eat it even when offered fish meal instead.
Instead, the fishing industry processes them into fish meal and oil to make food pellets for salmon farming and livestock feed - especially for Danish pigs.
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