Life of a Breeder

[TomislavKt]

Na jednom stranom forumu sam naletio na jedan zanimljiv post iz 2011. godine. Post me je toliko odusevio da ga moram podijeliti sa vama 
Covjek prepricava svoja iskustva iz Japana dok je bio u posjeti Dainichi farmi koja se bavi uzgojem koia.
Kopirati cu orginal tekst i istim redosljedom stavljati video zapise kako ih je autor orginalno postavljao.

[TomislavKt]

Life of a Breeder
I've been to Japan several time now and I've decided to share my experience with my fellow hobbiest. I have now been through several seasons at Dainichi Koi farm to see how the other side of koi lives. I have tried to do what most hobbiest wants to do, but can't due to money, time and lifestyle. I was just a hobbiest who met a good friend in Japan and now wants to learn more about koi beyond just buying and showing them. I have tried to see the life on a koi farm from all aspect and all season whenever possible.

I will show you what I've seen through videos and some pictures. So please enjoy the videos and let me know what you think.

First Day at Dainichi Koi Farm.



Looking at frys before the sembetsu starts.

[TomislavKt]

Bram's mud pond
Each staff on the farm is responsible for several mudponds, they are to feed every morning and monitor for problems to assure the kois safety. These are my friend Bram's mud pond he is to care for all these frys until they are harvest during the fall.



Both brothers Futoshi and Shigeru Mano, inspect all of their mud ponds every morning regardless of the weather. They have about 90 mud ponds just for frys this year, the fry mudponds can be identified with the blue nets surronding the ponds to keep away frogs and unwanted pests.

[TomislavKt]

Sembetsu Starts
These are the first mud pond to go through Sembetsu this year. These are frys from Oyagoi Dainichi are trying out for the first time to see if they are good oryagoi for future breeding.



Preping for the harvest of the first mud pond. It's about 4:30am and about 70 (F) degrees, it's a chilly morning.



It's 5am in the morning just day break and the water is freezing, it takes 1 person to go in the water to untangle the net.



Even Shigeru has to work, unfortuntely for me someone has to make the video.

[TomislavKt]

The Harvest
Caring is sharing Dick.

Here is the result for the harvest.





These are only about 30days old frys. There's about 50K frys in this pond, that's alot of frys to cull through. Do you see the Green Frog in the middle of the frys?

[TomislavKt]

Starting the sembetsu
This is the final product 30 days after the breeding, although it looks like alot, but these are suppose to be showa and there seems to be to much orange colored kois in the batch.



Now the hardest part of the work comes in.... countless hours of sitting in one place and picking out only black colored kois with some distinct patterns. Only a few of the staff are trained to complete this task, especially where the frys are are highly prized. Since this pond is only a trial pond, I was honored to sit down for a couple of hours to cull.

[TomislavKt]

Daily tasks
After the sembetsu there's the daily task of feeding the kois. Dainichi is feeding 1/3 FD growth, 1/3 FD Color, and 1/3 of a new wheat germ due to the high heat that they are currently experiencing.

The food are mixed together to get a even mixture for the kois. All the food you see in the background will last for about 1 week. Dainichi uses about 1.5 ton of koi food per week.



During the feeding their staff have to observe the frys to ensure if they are healthy. This is Saki Maki from Saki Maki koi farm he is a staff doing a 5 year internship with Dainichi he is responsible for about 20 mud ponds. He is medicating a fry mud pond one of the many he's taking care of.

[TomislavKt]

This is the first mud pond pull from Bram's first fry pond that he has been taken care of for the last month or so. This is the result that he has been waiting to see. You can see how anxious he was to harvest this mud pond, because he put in alot of time and effort to take care of these frys.

[TomislavKt]

Sembetsu start
Now we start on the sembetsu for Brams first pond, I believe Bram thinks he has the most frys in this pond than the other ponds he's currently taking care of. But when we harvest the frys it seems that there were to much orange color rather than black frys. Because it's Bram's first harvest and the first sembetsu on the farm, the Mano brothers decided to do the sembetsu themselves



One batch done now they start on the second batch of frys, as you can see it's very tidious work and takes alot of time. Since these mud ponds are next to the main house they are at comfort and working inside the koi house away from the scorching sun.

[TomislavKt]

One thing I notice in the last video, Shigeru takes almost twice the amount of frys to pick from than his brother. Is Shigeru the more experienced person of the two Mano brothers?

Hey Sonny, great to hear that your enjoying the videos. From what I can see Shigeru is the Man and I know he has the "EYE" for seeing kois. Most people take a long time to learn how to look at koi, I believe Shigeru is born with this gift. I've seen him glance at a koi and he can tell me the future of what that koi will be like.
The Dainichi Farm will be very difficult to function without Shigeru, although Futoshi is the elder brother and is very talented. I still think Shigeru Mano is a very special breeder and I'm glad to learn from him.

[TomislavKt]

Another Day
The day started out a little hazy kind of like one of those days that you didn't want to get up to go to school or work. Because the weather didn't look so great this morning so the staff decided to sit it out for a while and see how the weather will look.
As the day turned everything got darker and then the rain came!! and went on and on and on, it didn't ease up until close to evening time. So we ended up calling it a day and went to do indoor chores.

[TomislavKt]

The Next Day
So after a misserable day of nothing but rain the next day cleared up rather nicely. So we started all over again with the harvest of Bram's 2nd fry pond. We started at 8:00am instead of the usual 5:00 am and once the sun came up so did the heat.

[TomislavKt]

Results of 2nd fry pond
This is the result of the first pull from Bram's 2nd fry pond. From a glance when I first walked around the pond, Bram and I thought this pond might have the most frys in it and may produce the most frys from all his mud pond. It does look like alot of frys and there doesn't seem to be some orange color, but there are alot more of the gray and darker colors and all the frys seems to be the same size which is a very good sign.



We missed so many frys in the first pull that we had to re-seign the pond again and it showed that there were alot more frys than we had originally thought.

[TomislavKt]

What happens to the lefteovers
I hope everyone is enjoying the videos I've put together so far; sorry it hasn't been quick enough posting videos. Between playing catch up and work and jet lag, I'm trying my best.

I have had many hobbiest PM me alot of questions about my experience and the one most asked is about "What happens to the frys that were not selected"? This answer may offend some koi lovers, but it is - what it is! At Dainichi the frys that were not selected are killed and burried back in the ground to be used as fertillizer. But many of the other breeders kill the frys and boil them to use as food for other kois. This process is very hard to do because they have to do it early in the morning when the kois are most aggressive eaters, because if the frys are not all devoured in on feeding than they become waste in the water. Most breeders use the frys as feed because they think that the frys are a source of protein that if thrown away is wasteful. Sorry, people but I'm just stating what I saw and it is - what it is!

[TomislavKt]

Hirasawa Farm
I took a little break from the senbetsu and decided to go to Hirasawa Farm. Hirasawa is the original student of Dainichi Koi Farm and the first student of Minoru Mano when he started out Dainichi Koi Farm. Today Hirasawa has his own koi farms, but still works at Dainichi on a daily basis. Because Dainichi breeds so many Oyagoi and doesn't have enough room to do all the breeding Hirasawa breed some of their Oyagoi for them. These are frys only a few days old.



The frys are collected and put into Dainichi mud ponds to grow and harvest. This is Hirasawa san home and also his farm, he currently has about 30 mud pond of his own to take care beside his duties at Dainichi Koi Farm.



Inace od ovog uzgajivaca posjedujem sedam Koica.

[TomislavKt]

Thanks for your comments brother David, it is truly a blessing to see how a true koi is produced.All the hard work and time put into making a GC is much more simple than what I originally imagined. I mean it's much more than just putting a male and female koi together to produce a great koi.

This is one of the chores that Shigeru goes through during breaks from senbetsu, he has to inspect all the fry ponds to insure how successful was the breeding. This is a Sanke fry pond they are trying out and from I was told this was not a very good breeding.

[TomislavKt]

Bram's third fry pond
This is the third fry pond that Bram's is responsible for, I believe this may be the pond with the best result. Usually on a pond pull there are only 2 staffs, but since this is the beginning of senbetsu and they are not really busy yet they decided to have 3 staff do a pond pull.



Although there seems to be alot of orange color frys in this pond. However there are more black frys in this pond than most.

[TomislavKt]

Final pull of Brams fry ponds
This is the 2nd pond pull of Bram's 3rd fry pond, because they missed too many frys during the first pull they have to be extra careful the 2nd time around.



Usually they only pull a mud pond twice and the most 3 times, but there were still alot of frys in the pond after 3 tries so they decided to go for the record and did a 4th pull. The results were very good, this pond had alot of frys and they were all good sized frys with less orange frys than the other ponds. This maybe his best fry pond yet. Bram can you post the results on your fry pond or at least link us to the site of your experiments findings.

[TomislavKt]

Learning something new
I only had a couple of days left in Japan so I decided to venture out to the mud ponds with Osamu one of Dainichi experienced staff to see what do they do durning senbetsu. I learned that the breeders often spread chemicals in their fry ponds to kill off unwanted pests that occationally eat the frys.



Here is where Osamu actually have to dive in the water to remove all the dead pest from the mud to prevent the dead pest from polluting the waters. It was also a great way to cool down since it was scorching hot that time of day. I did join him wadding in the ponds, but no one was there to record the scene. I had fun and actually realized that the frogs and tadpoles don't eat the frys as much as the newt in the water.

[TomislavKt]

The last senbetsu
I only have a few days left to enjoy my stay in Japan, so I decided to see the last senbetsu on this day. This is the senbetsu of sanke frys. This pond had lots of frys in it so it took Futoshi and a few more staffs to finish the job.

[TomislavKt]

The result of the last senbetsu
This is the final result of the last senbetsu that I have seen during my time in Japan. If you want to see more than you have to wait for Bram to post more videos since he's still there. This pond had more tadpoles than any of the other mud ponds I have seen. Overall they think that this batch of sanke is ok, but they believe they will change out the male next year to see if there are changes.

[Lili]

Poučna reportaža. Hvala na sheranju, stvarno je zanimljivo. Ne mogu si uopće zamisliti koja je muka uzgojiti kvalitetnog koia... mislim mogu, ali mora da je muka. No na kraju se isplati, sudeći po trudu kojeg ljudi ulažu 

[TomislavKt]

Da, ogroman je to posao. Nije to samo "pustit cemo dva muzjaka i zenku pa sta bude". Kad vidim sa koliko paznje oni izvlace te mreze sa mladju van i paze da nebi slucajno koja ostala u mrezi ... nikad ne znas koja ce biti prava. Koliko hrane i medikamenata se baci ribama