A Week in the Life of a Koi Farmer (WC 30_03_26)
The chill in the air this month doesn’t seem to have held back the interest in koi for the new season, and we end March having had one of our busiest starts to the year.
With night temperatures still feeling particularly low, many customers who purchased over the winter and opted for spring collection have been waiting for things to warm up before moving their koi. A number of overwintered koi have now been collected or shipped, but the majority will likely head out over the coming weeks as conditions improve.
Alongside that, attention on the farm has started to shift toward the new season’s BKF bred tosai.
First Harvest of BKF-Bred Tosai
This week we began harvesting some of our first batches of BKF-bred tosai.
It’s always a key moment in the season — the koi change considerably from the winter selection. This final tosai selection is the koi's 5th selection and there’s a lot that you simply can’t judge until the koi reach this point.
From these early harvests, we’ve started to identify a group of koi that stand out for their quality and future potential. These are the fish that will form the basis of our first BKF-bred tosai release of the season.
We took some video during the harvest, which gives a good feel for how these fish are looking at this stage.
Friday Night Release – BKF Tosai
The best of this first harvest are now being prepared for cataloguing, and will be released online this Friday at 8pm.
As always, these aren’t volume-selected fish. These are the individuals that stood out for Amanda and I during handling — koi that show the kind of traits we look for when thinking longer-term, not just how they appear today.
This is only the start of the BKF tosai for this season. We have a significant number of young koi coming through, and further harvests and releases will follow over the coming weeks.
That said, each harvest brings forward a different mix of fish, and once these are gone, they’re gone.
The first selections from today are mainly beni kikokuryu from a new female we ran last year. The output looks very promising! And there are some unique koi in this batch too.
Like last year, we will be cataloging and listing a wide range from these harvests, including, specials - these are koi we would typically keep here at the farm and grow to nisai. We will make these available but on a time limited availability. Expect prices for those to be close to what we expect their value to be at nisai.
More on that later this week.
We’ll be sharing preview bowl videos over the next few days ahead of the release.
