Where do culled baby koi go?

[Akai-San]

What do prominent koi breeders do with the culled babies? Say when they cull 3"-4" babies. Do they bulk sell them to people of distributors/petshops/joe shmo? Or do they destroy them to protect their lines?

[Fishbreeder]

Many years ago when I was in Japan, I was told culls were boiled and fed back to the bigger koi. Alternatively composted for fertilizer, or just disposed of.

At my farm I sell the culls as fish bait or as feeder fish for largemouth bass growing operations nearby.

Many American koi farms sell the culls as "decorative" extremely low grade (cheap) koi for water gardeners.

Brett

[luke frisbee]

hey BRETT,
I'm gonna go out to the stick marsh with 20 of my friends...i need to put a bait order in....the bass seem to hit the ones that are about 30-70% red...and every so often they have lock jaw that can only be loosened by really really white fish with a good amount of tar like black and some more red as well...though some without red are preferred by a couple of my fishing buddies.......

Oh and the bait really needs to be lively...I don't know how the bass know but they only hit real lively koi that are growing real fast.....

Whud ya get for 'em by the thousand, boss man?

(alot of us were thinking about it, i just wrote it....roflmhao)

[dick benbow]

I knew of a major operation in japan that ground them up and fed them back to their brothers and sisters.