Koi breeding is not difficult if you pay attention to a few important points. Most vital is choosing the right koi breeds to begin with. The four most common varieties that you will find in a koi contest are most likely the Kohaku, Sanke, Showa and Shusui breeds so you should start with one or a few of these koi varities.
Having quality koi fish is the most important prerequisite to make a profit breeding and selling them. If you do it right it is not exaggerated to regain your investment not only double or triple but even up to ten times. This is possible due to the fact that Kois not only constantly produce eggs but also live quite a long time. A life span of 50 years isn’t unheard of and there are stories of koi living to over 100 years!
So let’s review what you should do in order to breed Koi fish for profit and turn an extremely exceptional source of income into a highly rewarding project or even a profitable company.
1. Choose the right breeding stock
It’s essential that you have a great Koi breeding stock to start from, or your koi breeding project may be over before it even began. A great stock not only means having an excellent supply of quality fish but also to ensure biological and genetic diversity. The worth of your offspring will be mainly determined by the worth of the parents, so select the parent fish wisely! Usually you should spend around a thousand US-dollars for a pair of quality parent fish. But keep in mind: When you buy them you need to make sure your designated parent fish are at least three years old because only then they will be sexually mature and able to produce offspring.
2. Prepare a good koi breeding pond
Obviously the space where you want your Koi fish to live and grow is the second most important point after selecting your breed. Koi breeding ponds don’t need to be pricey, but you also should consider other necessary expenses for tanks, filters, chemicals, etc. These costs can not be avoided as filter systems are essential to sustain clean and healthy water levels for your kois and sometimes they will also need some meds. When choosing a place for your koi breeding pond you must ensure that it is secure and safe from predators. Also you need to think of additional space for the offspring you want to create. Time wise breeding kois will take a few hours for maintenance and feeding on a daily basis.
3. Nourishment
Usually Koi will eat anything they can fit in their mouths and in natural ponds with lots of mud and algae they do very well on their own and require little to no supplemental feeds. But if you are keeping them in clean and filtered water without algae you must care for their nutrition. To ensure that the skin and scales of your newly-bred Koi fish will become bright you should feed them a variety of foods as multiple diets will give you a better chance of covering all requirements. Of course you want your baby kois to be healthy and vibrant so their nourishment should contain all required nutrients. For example you can mix several quality pellets from the market or feeding two foods on alternate days. Quality Koi food pellets are usually more or less complete in regards of vitamins and minerals but you can also feed them living food such as earthworms, grasshoppers, shrimp, crustaceans, tubifex worms or small frog tadpoles and vegetables like duckweed, romaine lettuce, etc.
4. Culling
You can’t have a queasy stomach about culling Koi. The aforementioned benefit that Kois constantly produce eggs makes is inevitable to cull out the ones that will not look good and therefore also will not be good to sell. If you don’t remove these fish you soon will be overwhelmed by thousands of little kois that need space and want to be fed. So specific fish absolutely should be removed to ensure you keep the genetic stock.
5. Selling
For most breeders, selling Koi isn’t the most easy thing to do, as it takes time to develop a reputation and demonstrate that you just create quality fish. But rest assured that over time, you are able to with hard work and a see-through procedure that reveals buyers what you’ve been able to achieve, breed Koi and make it so they turn a profit with their breeding and more. Actually, as it pertains to worth koi can control some seriously big sums of cash! One specific Showa specimen went for over $258, 000 As Asia is where koi mating first began similar to possessing a rare historical artifact, these prized contest fish are a source of national pride for affluent Asians. Just as in horse racing, world famous breeders for the explicit aim of procreation a winner often breed these fish.
You have some great, clean photographs of them as it pertains time to sell some or all your koi the finest method to sell them is to make sure. Rather set the koi with no glare, reflection or ripples in the water, in a royal blue container. Don’t forget to get the entire fish in the framework from directly over, not an angle picture. You may need to shoot a dozen or so pictures to get one picture that is useable. Subsequently post websites or those pictures on whatever website you’d like to sell on them. Be patient, and be prepared to invest some cash to begin, but it’s not impossible to breed Koi in this way and make a profit!