Democratic Sentinel, Volume 6, Number 51, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 January 1883 — Fish Food. [ARTICLE]

Fish Food.

The Fish Commissioner has done much toward increasing and disseminating this class of food throughout the country. The trouble has been to get a flsh adapted to the necessities of all sections. The evidence is accumulating to prove that in the German carp we have a food-fish capable of furnishing almost unlimited supplies at very little cost. This fish is of especial value to farmers, as it will live in ponds which become so warm that no other fish can exist in them. It is unnecessary to enlarge upon the added comfort it would be to a farmer if he could go out and take from his pond a five or six-pound carp which would give him and liis family a good dinner. Any ordinary pond will do for a carp. An excavation in the course of a creek, dammed at the lower end with a grating, so that a flood will not carry the fish away, answers perfectly. The carp will eat almost anything, and a pond of foul square rods in extent will furnish all the fish-food a family wants. Carp grow from the egg to three pounds in one year. They multiply rapidly, a single female yielding half a million eggs in a year. They spawn in May and June. In the winter they burrow in the mud and remain dormant, neither making nor losing growth. In the spawning season they must lie fed, or they will destroy the spawn. At other times they need not be fed, unless there are so many of them in the pond that the aquatic vegetation and supplies brought down by the feeding stream are insufficient. There is scarcely a doubt that a carp-pond would be a profitable adjunct to nearly every farm. —lndustrial Review. An Australian sheep raiser, who boasted of paying $2,0U0 for 200 pounds of British butter, further exploiued that his purchase was a first-class imported ram.