| Summary: | Floating bed organic cultivation of different vegetables, flowers, and seedlings have been shown a promising means of
agricultural crop production in different wetland areas of Bangladesh. The present study was aimed at finding out the
suitability of the integration of fish in this system in waterlogged areas. The experiment consists of three treatments
namely SB, silver barb Barbonymus gonionotus; T, tilapia Oreochromis niloticus; and SBT, tilapia: silver barb
(1:1 ratio) with three replications of 6.75 m2
floating vegetable beds in each. Fish were stocked at a rate of 3 m-2 for
five months of culture and fed at 1.5% of body weight twice daily. Over the study period, water quality parameters and
fish survival rate did not vary significantly among different treatments. Tilapia showed significantly higher daily and
specific growth rates in mono- and polyculture, but silver barb only in polyculture system. Thus, total fish production
in kg ha-1 was significantly higher in treatments T (p = 0.001) and SBT (p = 0.001) than SB. Vegetable production was
not significantly different among treatments. In the financial analysis, the benefit-cost ratio of different treatments
was >1, indicating that investment was financially profitable for all treatments, but treatment T and SBT were
more profitable. Therefore, we can conclude that integrating fish with floating bed agriculture systems could be an
ideal approach to generate alternate income activities and mitigate climate change effects among disaster-prone
waterlogged regions of Bangladesh.
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