[ranskye]

here are a couple of pictures i took with my camera phone.
this is the first of around four crops of koi we will do this season.
maybe six if i want to work harder.
the koi are mainly yellow ogons or should i say orgons..hmm.
they seem to sell quiet well over here in aquarium shops and in garden centres so this is why we bred these fish first.
i did throw in a few other pairs but the offspring are hard to come by from those pairs.

i estimate that we got about 40-60,000 koi from this run.
anything from 40- 100,000 or so would be considered a good crop.
i think there is the opportunity to increase the production of the ponds by about double if i were to have more time to look over them, only recently has this farm had earation added to the ponds so we should see a decent jump in holding capacity before the guys get sick.

there are only two sets of full time hands on the farm currently with some extra help for harvesting and counting and packing on delivery days.

numbers ussually depends on brood quality and time of the year for hatching our eggs.

in one picture you can see the koi in a plastic grading tub which is inserted into water in a wheel barrow and everything under around 45mm long can swim out into the wheel barrow leaving us to sort through the larger fish first as we dont want them getting too big if they are rubbish.
the najority of the fish come out of the pond at 30-40mm long with around 30 fish that are up to 120mm long.

we sell everything we produce as feeders and only keep maybe a hundred fish for growing up to larger sizes and we also keep around a thousand fish with nice colour to be sold as select koi at 50mm size for peoples aquarium tanks.

only now am i concentrating on really getting into the nitty gritty of producing some beuatiful show like fish, and paying attention to pairing.

in the early years on the farm it was often just mass spawns as it seemed to produce larger crops of feeders but now i have been given permision by the big boss to pair away.

oh and the cage you see floating with the black plastic guards is what we dump the koi in after we catch them out of the pond.
we use hand held nets and scoop them into a bucket of colder water and the cages are ussaully floating on the adjacent pond.

we may use between 6-8 cages to hold them prior to grading depending upon how many are in the pond.

once graded they go back into cages designated for their size or quality.

we use about 100 of these cages on the farm to hold stock. they are about 2.4m long by 1.2 wide and around .8 deep.