What Temperatures are the ponds in Florida?

[Ken]

My local fish store and I'll bet most others buy their fish from breeders/wholesalers in Florida. Has anyone been to one of those places and measured the water's temperature? We all seem to be wrapped around the axle about the temperature of the fish's home waters in some far off land when in fact their home water is a fish farm.

[Cory]

I don't know the stats but I'd wager far more fish come from overseas vs from Florida. Most farms in Florida import fish. While there are some breeding. Most fish from those I speak with are coming in from other much warmer countries. 

With all that being said, I don't know of all the temps  in Florida ponds. I'd watch imperial tropicals youtube channel as he'll call out daytime temps during his streams while walking around sometimes.

 

Many fish can tolerate a wide variety of water temps. However I find that illness can be more common when it comes to fish entering out of their comfort zones.

[gardenman]

Florida fish farming has become more tightly regulated which makes it more expensive to fish farm in Florida, so most of the tropical fish production has now shifted overseas. In the old days you used to be able to buy some swampy land that couldn't be built on for next to nothing. Wade in with an excavator or backhoe, dig big holes in the swamp to form ponds.  Pile up the dirt removed to make paths between the ponds. Shazam! Throw in a handful of fish and you've got a fish farm. Every now and then you'd wade into the pond with a net and harvest the fish and then throw a few back in to restart the process. The ponds were largely self-feeding and carefree. It was a cheap, effective use of land that was otherwise useless.

It was originally a largely unregulated business. It's anything but unregulated now. From what I understand, many of the tropical fish species are now required to be raised indoors to limit the chance they could escape into the wild. The outdoor ponds, when they're allowed at all, have to be setup in a manner so that they feed into a pond with native predatory fish that will eat the farm-raised fish should they escape their breeding pond. Everything now is tightly regulated and thus more expensive. Why raise a fish yourself if you can buy them for less than it costs you to raise them? 

I think it's possible to have an indoor fish farm where fish are raised indoors in controlled conditions. The startup costs would be high (lots of tanks, containers, space, etc. but if you could find a large enough enclosed space (an old department store or supermarket) at a good price and taxes were low enough, it's probably a doable proposition. In a perfect world, an old mall could be used where each of the former stores was dedicated to one species of fish with each store heated/cooled to the ideal temp for that fish. A former store filled with tanks/vats filled with neon tetras in various stages of growth would be kind of neat. Fish that were ready for sale could be in tanks just outside the stores where they were raised and ready to be collected and bagged for shipping to stores. I think it would be doable, but the economics would have to be perfect. And if you invested to start it you'd need to know the local politicians wouldn't end up taxing/regulating you out of business down the road. I think it is doable, but the startup costs are daunting and you can't trust politicians not to kill your business. It could be run by a relatively small number of employees. With international shipping costs for live fish being what they are, there's a window there that could make it profitable if operated on a regional basis and buyers handled their own transport. The number of fish you could raise could be in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions per month. If you could move a million fish a month and clear just a penny per fish, you'd be looking at a profit of $10,000 per month. But the startup costs are a killer.