Snail feeding: heliculture

In snail farming, one of the secrets of success is, without a doubt, snail feeding. As in all farms, even in the case of gastropods, the correct availability of food definitely affects the growth and health of specimens. In order for snails to grow well, it is necessary to feed them as well as possible.

Contents [Ocultar]

  • Swiss chard grown directly on the fence

  • Complementary feeding of snails

  • When and how much to feed snails

  • A few tips in conclusion

Contents

Map grown directly on the fence

A first food available to snails should be grown directly on the fence. On each helipad in the spring, beets are sown in the spring. These plants will grow right in the middle of the snails, they are important because they provide food but also because they create a shady and cool habitat.

Cultivated Swiss chard is a very useful food, especially in the initial brood introduction phase. When the new snails hatch, it will be essential to supplement their diet. It should be remembered that breeding snails mate quickly and in about 20 days they lay their eggs, which hatch after about three weeks. Each adult snail is capable of laying a hundred eggs at a time, since the gastropod hermaphrodite lays all the eggs. In a season, there are three or four mating phases, with corresponding births.

With these data you realize that the number of snails in each fence increases very quickly. Therefore, the feed requirements of the herd cannot be met solely by the rations sown in the spring. This is also because newborn snails have a rapid growth phase, which requires a lot of resources: during the first month of life, a snail quadruples its weight, in the following two months it doubles. For this reason, diets on the fence are useful, but they must be integrated and we will see how later.

Additional notice for snails

The mollusc’s diet should be based on both fresh seasonal plant foods, such as lettuce, salads, eggplants, zucchini, and especially sunflowers and carrots, as well as floured cereal foods with in calcium.

Fresh vegetables. Fresh vegetables can be obtained by using an external part of the ground for their cultivation, in this way the propeller cultivator can produce the food useful for their breeding. In general, the cultivation of vegetables requires an area equivalent to one third of the total space used by the propeller farm. If you wish to sow sunflower, this can be done from May to September, it is advisable to sow in stages at regular intervals of about three weeks.

Cereal flour products. To ensure a good nutritional balance, a healthy and varied diet is necessary, which is why the diet of snails must be supplemented with a mixture of ground cereals with flour at least once a week. It is important to ensure that this food is enriched with calcium, a fundamental element for the formation of the eggshell. The purchase of the specific flower fodder is quite expensive for choppers, the advice is to produce this food yourself. To do this, you just need to buy the ingredients and have a grinder. The company La Lumaca di Ambra Cantoni publishes a proven recipe for floured fodder free of charge when purchasing broodstock, so that the breeder can prepare a balanced diet for the snails himself.

When and how much to feed snails

When to distribute food. Coastal beets grown in the pen are always available to the snails, while supplementary feeding, whether of fresh or floured vegetables, should be given in the late afternoon or evening, just after the watering the enclosure.

amount of food needed. Deciding how much food is needed should be adjusted based on the actual population density within the enclosure. In the first periods you will certainly need less, until it increases significantly, since snails mate several times during the season. To assess the average density of the population, it is necessary to come to the breeding farm at least a few hours after watering: the social life of the snail proceeds strictly from sunset. During the day, it will be difficult to find the snails clearly inside the enclosure, they stay hidden among the leaves to protect themselves from the sun’s rays.

A few tips in conclusion

To conclude, the feed integration operation is carried out from the time the first babies begin to be seen until they reach adulthood in the following season, when they will be harvested and sold. A word of advice: don’t be fooled by the beauty of chard planted inside fences: they will be full of slime and therefore unattractive to snails.

Leave a Comment