[ranskye]

hi steve,
i am in australia, i will be using a standard silver perch fertilisation regime to get a bloom up in my ponds.
this would consist of bales of hay, cottonseed meal and pollard for the organic side of things and di ammonia phos, urea and potash for inorganic.
this should do a good job at producing the live feed for the koi. it does the trick for the natives round here..
i worked at a farm once where we had one meg concrete tanks and we did koi and goldfish and they used to feed them a slurry of powdered fish pellets (ground up to less than 1mm, we also tried a high protien barramundi diet, which seemed to do better than the carbo one but maybe the carbo one was poor in other things..
thing was i reckon the only live feed was in small amounts as we never fertilised there and hardly had green water as such, we had no aeration and we would get a die off of maybe 20 percent as the biomass increased. the only fert was what was left in the pond from the previous crop. fish crap.
so this time i want to have more live food and earation.
as well as this we used to spawn in the pond and remove parents and sometimes we would have large numbers of eggs that were attacked by fungus, i wasnt sure if this was due to infertile eggs due to the milt drifting off or temperatures or what but it seemed to be related to temp. i figure this time round i could spawn in a hatchery tank and release the fry into the pond at 2 days after hatch.
we used to get about a hundred thousand from a pond but many would be eaten by the bargers, sometimes wed harvest 20,000 only.
i remember one time we spawned these goldfish and we had a unusually high
hatch out, so many hundreds of thousands that we couldnt keep em fed and it turned out to be a bad crop. funny thing was the only differerence was that we had filled this big hole in the pond bottom with river sand so maybe the eggs sunk and hit the sand and lived instead of dying on the bottom. this is why i want to spawn in tanks now where i can keep an eye out and maintain less broodstock that are better quality. wish i could get some big fat stock from japan actually..
i was wondering if i should start feeding in the hatchery tanks before dropping them into the big ponds but it seems like a lot of trouble if the little fry will get the best nutrition in a pond anyway..
thanks bloke.