A week in the life of a koi farmer w/c 11/3/24: A busy week ahead!
The koi farming season for a breeder has many busy periods! But this stage of the year in particular comes with juggling the most number of balls.
We are carrying the largest amount of stock from the previous 2 year's worth of spawnings, that all need to be looked after very carefully. We also are preparing fry ponds for use, and taking the brood fish through the final stages before they will be spawning. There are many selections to be made as we choose which koi will be kept on the farm for a second summer... these become our 'ake nisai'. And, this week... as well as work on all the above things; we are also bringing all the small koi mix through to the sales room and sizing them. There's also a significant amount of tank and filter cleaning work (the kids have been warned, that we may need help !). My son Solomon helped with cleaning the breeding tanks last year, and he's raring to get going with the jet wash this year :-) And my daughter Joely has been working with me over the winter on a hobby breeding project indoors with Guppies. She's also going to be helping out much more this year on the spawnings, selections and general farm work. All 3 of our children will be working on our stands this year at the koi shows, and at our open day which is provisionally scheduled for Sunday 2nd June.
Quarantine on our new brood stock that we imported in January is now complete, and they're now in the general brood fish tanks. I'm really happy with how they are looking and these will bolster our Showa production and help us start with Sanke. We may get lucky and spawn one or two of the females this year, but next year is more likely.
The online koi releases have been going down well, and this is becoming a weekly routine! We will try and keep that up through the year, to bring you some exciting new stock each week. This week we plan to release on Friday evening, and the release will contain a wide range of varieties in our Value Tosai offerings (£35 and £50), with some at larger tosai sizes too.
The new small koi mix stock will be in sales room from this weekend! And, it will also become available online too.
Prices are by size, and can be viewed at the bottom of this page:
https://www.byerkoifarm.co.uk/collections/small-koi
We are open both days on the weekend, and if you want to check whether we are open.. either drop us a line, or you can check on our google business listing here:
We're open by appointment any day too.
That's it for now. And, we hope to bring more footage as we progress through this week's busy work schedule.
