International Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Research

Authors
U Sah, SN Mehta

Abstract
Rice-fish farming as a cost effective integrated practices for marginal and poor farmers. It is one of the effective farming methods for increasing productivity of rice by recycling the energy and matter of a given ecosystem in sustainable manner. An experiment was carried out at Regional Agricultural Research Station (RARS), Tarahara, Nepal for 90 days during March to June 2015 to evaluate performance of Common carp and tilapia in rice plot. The rice field was occupied 10 % refuge area in one side of rice plot as holding place for fish emergencies. The height of dike was maintained 0.5 m, top width was 0.4 m and base width was 0.5 m. The water level maintained during the research period was up to 25 cm and fish production could reached 450-500 kg/ha without providing any supplementary feed to the fish stocked in their rice field. The fish harvested weight from common carp and tilapia polyculture 32.15 g was higher than monoculture of common carp was 20.10 g and monoculture of tilapia was 18.54 g. This study showed that production of rice do not decrease with use of refuge in ricefield. The rice production with fish was 4.5 mt/ha and without fish rice production was 3 mt/ha. The rice production increased by 10-12%.