Robbz: Alright, guys, welcome to the podcast. We got to jump right into our charity choice, and that's always Ohio Fish Rescue. We love Ohio Fish Rescue. We love Ohio Fish Rescue.
Jimmy: What's up, guys?
Robbz: So Ohio Fish Rescue is a fantastic not for profit organization that takes all of these wonderful fish that people decided were great in a tiny aquarium and instead of of throwing them in lake, river or even down their toilet, they rescue them as a normal humane Society would. But there's not Humane Society for fish. It's Ohio Fish Rescue. So these guys make sure they either get suitable homes or keep them right there in their large facilities. Certainly go to their website, ohiofishrescue.com, and donate. They have T shirts available. They have ways to donate directly through paypal, patreon or gofundme. But on top of giving your money, also give them a call. 216-77-3407.
Jimmy: Fantastic, Rob. Call and give them a little change. Give them a little money, give them a little love, because these guys are doing the right thing. They're taking care of the hobby and making sure that these fish do not end up out into the wild, into the lakes and streams. We're up here in northern Minnesota, and that is a nightmare when that happens up in our neck of the woods.
Robbz: Again, they didn't tell us to use a phone number, but we really want just a phone call reminding them, hey, you guys do a great job. Really got to point that out. Ohio Fish Rescue. Let's kick that podcast. Welcome to the aquarium, guys.
Greg: Podcast with your hosts, Jim colby and Rob dolson.
Robbz: All right, guys, welcome to the podcast. This week I'm really hyped. We're getting great listen numbers.
Jimmy: Fantastic listening numbers.
Robbz: Yes. For only four episodes, no advertisement and you didn't even get a Twitter made yet.
Jimmy: I am on. I have not done a tweet and I don't know what a tweet is because I'm old, well, and dusty.
Robbz: Everything in time. You didn't know what a podcast is. And now we're I know cruising, man.
Jimmy: I'm a professional. And people just go, wow, Jim, you are fantastic on the radio. Nobody knows.
Robbz: So I'm one of your hosts, robs olsen. And my deliciously elderly partner over here that doesn't know how to tweet is Jim colby.
Jimmy: Jim colby and rob's and I have been friends for years. And now we are taking it live on the air to our friends and fellow hobbyists. We're really excited to bring this to podcast, and today we have a special guest.
Robbz: Go ahead and introduce yourself, sir.
Greg: Hi, I'm greg bickle from bickle coy farm in toddville, iowa.
Robbz: We're super excited to have you. We appreciate you taking the time. We were going to have you last week, but you were in a dire situation. You hit a deer, you said.
Greg: That's right. I was driving home from our farm. We have two properties. We have a house where we sell koi retail and then we have another farm that's about 25 miles away where we raise all our wholesale stuff. And on the way home, just smack dab, hit a deer eight point buck head on. Immediately came to a stop and had to wait and get rescued by some friends.
Robbz: And you're all right? There's no injuries here?
Greg: Yeah, no injuries. Just my truck. lola is my truck's name. The insurance company is kind of running a little deal there, where to me, there wasn't much damage, but they ended up totaling out my vehicle. And so now I'm going to spend this next week vehicle shopping, which is not my cup of tea.
Robbz: So what you're saying is we can have the listeners call in to us and recommend names for your new truck.
Greg: That's right. I'm thinking lola, because this is a little bit of a lol. Maybe I should call it lol instead of lola, just because it's laughable that they didn't want to repair. All they needed was a new bumper, new grill and one new headlight. So the fact that they total out of vehicle for that is kind of laughable in my mind.
Jimmy: And now you need a new insurance company.
Greg: Well, maybe we'll have to look around and see if that's the case.
Robbz: So we're going to dive in to interview with you. And again, this episode, we want to really focus on coy, because if we're going to interview a coy farmer, who better to get the information from? Not us, that's for sure.
Greg: How?
Jimmy: Hell, no. We've killed too many coy.
Robbz: So before we can really start in the interview, we just want to do a couple of items to clean up. Adam, I know you're listening, and he said he would have his gear by this week, but he was unavailable to join us. He's still setting up his gear, so he will be here Darnet next week to appreciate this podcast together with us. And secondly, go to our website, Aquariumguyspodcast.com. And on the bottom of the website, we have our contact information. There's our phone number directly on there it is, 218-214-9214. We're still waiting for people to call into the show. We have quite a few listeners for our first four episodes, but we're still looking for someone to call in with questions and air live on this show. Please call us. Jimmy is just begging for fan mail. Absolutely.
Jimmy: Yeah, we're getting a lot of fan comments, but no questions. So I'll probably have to disguise my voice and call in next week.
Robbz: So I have a quick story before we jump in. I was talking with one of my friends and we were in the car and we're talking about this podcast and how it's going so well. And I didn't really check all the stores because we're on so many different platforms. We're on spotify stitcher. Tune in. I heart radio, but I have an Android phone myself and I was just telling him that I wonder I was talking with a friend and he said they were rated five stars on itunes already. Oh, fantastic. And he pulls it up. I'm like, I don't know. I don't think we're going to have any reviews or anything. He pulls it up, oh, no, there's a review. And I just I said to him, oh, it's going to be some, like, hipster lacroix drinking cyclist or something from Wisconsin, right. And he read it. And not to make fun of the listener, but we have a fantastic review from Vegan Cyclist 420 thanks, mom. That says on the podcast that we're doing a fantastic job. He loves it, and shout out. I didn't even mean to stereotype, but we had a great laugh in the car, and those reviews mean a lot to us. And thank you to the Vegan Cyclist listeners out there. You know what?
Jimmy: Let's have him on next week and let's see what he's got to say.
Robbz: We're going to do a direct shout out to you, sir. You need to call into that number. Give us a call so we can have a question. All right, let's dive in. Greg oh, man. Do you want to do a quick introduction again? You said you own a coy farm in toddville, Iowa. Start at the top. What brought you to start farming? Coy.
Greg: Okay, so kind of we were talking about this a little bit earlier is guppies. So what got me started in Koi was my grandpa. My mom's dad had a ten gallon tank while growing up, he had it like a 30 gallon tank. But when I got out of the military, he had a ten gallon tank of guppies, and him and grandma had to move into the nursing home. And so he gave me this ten gallon tank of guppies, and I started raising the guppies and of course, life bears and they're having all these babies, and subsequently I killed them all because I wasn't paying attention to ammonia and I didn't know all that yet. So we start off with the guppies, and then from there I got goldfish. Because you couldn't avoid coy at the time. Koi were super expensive. So we used to go to the local corey and Catch. I take my boat and we go around with a big net and catch all these goldfish when they're spawning. Then I fell in love with koi. My wife and I went on our honeymoon, 1997, and I fell in love with Koi at the omaha Zoo. They had a big pond, what they call monkey Island, and they had all thousands and thousands of large koi there. And from there I started acquiring Koi and it just blossomed from there.
Robbz: That's fantastic. So a quarry where exactly where you're at that you could just scoop goldfish out of the wild, right.
Greg: We were talking earlier, too, about Ohio fish rescue when you first came on, and most people, if they don't have a place that will rescue the fish. They'll dump them somewhere. And a popular place to dump them is in either retention ponds or quarries, old quarries. So there's an old quarry probably, I don't know, 45 minutes from my place, and tons and tons of goldfishing. I mean, probably a five acre core. And it had to have thousands and thousands of goldfishing. So we said, hey, we'll go in. We actually first started off as greg's goldfish farm. And so, as you look at my website, is just bickle.com because I may not be bickle Koi Farm sometime in the future. We may be Bickles guppy farm or pickles guinea pig farm or bickle's bird houses. Who knows what will be in the future? So it's just kind of a simple web address. But we went there and we caught all kinds of these goldfish. The best way to catch any fish I found is when they're spawning. They're pretty oblivious to what's going on. You can just run in, scoop them up with a big net and catch them that way. And we were very successful catching them that way. And we would bring them home, and then we could resell them or breed them and do it that way, too.
Jimmy: How many would you get on an average day when you went out there?
Greg: Oh, probably 30 to 35, 40. No, if I knew they were spawning at home, I knew they'd be spawning there. You kind of get to learning when fish spawn in the spring, full moon and all the different things that go on. So we would go and we would get quite a few and bring them home in rubber made tubs, running bubblers and running all these rubber made tubs. And we thought we were the greatest thing since sliced bread catching all these goldfish. Which now goldfish are pretty much worthless. Everybody gives them away except for the fancier breeds, ARANDAS and those other things.
Robbz: But that's fascinating. Quarries. Yeah, there's not a whole lot of quarries by us, but again, our bodies of water are pretty common in where we're at, Minnesota. We're right in the heart of the lake. So our bodies of water, we don't want to touch much. But that's fascinating. So you got goldfish and you bred them. Is that what it was?
Greg: Right. Yeah, we bred goldfish and sold them. But then that was just in the start, like 1995. That was way back. It's hard to remember back then, but and then once I went on my honeymoon and got hooked on Koi, then we actually went to the local zoo and in Des moines and they had coy there and we worked to deal with them, that we give them a donation and they'd let us just throw food in and whatever. We could catch up. We could buy for $20 apiece. That was back when yeah, big koi were very expensive back then. And I caught up many nice specimens, and I made a huge net, like it was probably five foot across. I sewed it out of a big sane five foot across and 3ft deep. And then we kicked two nets and we just what we call a clam shell. When you take two nets to catch a fish and you just kind of snap them both together, we call that like, clam shelling. You come up with your own terms when you're catching fish anyways, but we would catch them and bring them home once again in rubber made tubs and then breed those. And it wasn't until I went to Japan in 2004 that I got some really good koi to use as breeding stock because you're limited with, with koi that breed flock spawning and they haven't been controlled, the genetics is, are pretty bad, it's pretty weak. So when we went to Japan in 2004, then we picked out some really good, some really good breeding stock and that helped tremendously. Before that, I had purchased two other fish from a guy in davenport. They were show fish and I think that was the first pair of koi that I bred with. It was $900 for the pair and it was a three color fish for the people who know koi. It was a sanke male and a show of female. And we produced really nice looking fish with those and I said, I've got to get better breeding stock. So then we went to Japan and picked out a bunch of stuff. But as things would go, some of the fish died. There was a big earthquake there two days after we left, and some of the fish that we picked out died. So we didn't get to bring those back. But otherwise we were very successful breeding those fish. I think I got like, maybe eleven fish total for maybe around $1,600. And we were very successful breeding those fish. And to this day, I've only got three of those original fish left. Most of them were hatched in 2002, so they'd be like 17 years old now. And that's quite a ways to breed a fish every year, especially a female. To get that many years out of a female is pretty remarkable.
Jimmy: So you got your money back on all that?
Greg: Oh, yeah, we got our money back for sure. Yeah, that, that was, that was good. That was a good investment. And the last year we lost those original two koi that I had purchased. We lost those last year. Like, one was, the male was 20 and the female was 21 for breeding stock. That's incredible for breeding stock. And she had bred all the way up until she was, like, 18. And one year she had burst an ovary, like completely out of her body. She just ulcered up and then big thing popped out of her body. And I thought, okay, she's going to be done breeding, she's going to die. She healed up just fine. And then the next year she bred from the other ovary. So she'd only breed every other year. After that, I got one more breeding out of her and that was it. But they produce super nice babies. So really, the quality of the breeding stock, it definitely matters. Like in Japan, a breeder will focus on just one breed of Koi. A white and red. A kohaku or a sanki or a show or something. But in America, we have to produce a lot of different varieties. So we're not really able to focus on quality in one specific breed. Because if you just bred that, you wouldn't have enough business to keep going.
Jimmy: Yeah, I find that here in the Us. Everybody like the pet store is. The majority of the people are just ordering the assorted. Koi. Is that what you're finding true also?
Greg: Right? Yeah, the assorted koi. And now the market is really leaning towards Butterfly. Koi.
Jimmy: Absolutely.
Greg: Which I'm not a real fan of butterfly koi. I like the traditional koi. We started with Butterfly Koi. So you're talking about rescues. We go back to this Ohio Fish rescue. And over the years, we've done rescues. Also. We've got a website. A part of our website has a rescue page on it. So if somebody's coy do need rescue, we can't find anybody in their area. It just depends on where they're at. People calls from all over the country. Like if they were in Ohio, I would send them to Ohio Fish Rescue. If they were in Minnesota, I would find people up in Minnesota that I knew, like robs. Anybody else? Over the years with rescues. We would rescue people's, coy, and one batch of fish that we rescued. There was a big, ugly orange and black spotted butterfly in that. And my space here at home was limited. We didn't have the second farm. We were still a small operation. And so we had a deal worked out with a nursery, a greenhouse, the next town over. And they would let us use their pond. Was was about 40ft wide by 80 foot long. They would let us use their pond to breed koi. And I would provide all the food for the koi, and they would feed them and take care of them, take care of the water quality, and then I could harvest them when I needed to. And so we threw those rescue fish in there the first year, and they made so many nice babies. And that butterfly gene came out. The butterfly gene seems to be I'm not a geneticist, and I haven't studied Koi genetics very well, but it seems to be pretty dominant that I get a lot of the babies. 50% or more seem to be butterfly, but yet the colors seem to come from the straight fin. Koi. And so we weren't getting that ugly orange and black fish. We were getting more of the shiny metallics and some other things. So that worked out. So that's how we started off with butterfly koi a few years back. And then sometimes a customer will come in, and they'll have a fish that's gotten too big for them, and I'll take that fish back, and I might use it as a breeding stock. Anytime we get rescue fish in, we don't ever sell them. We just give them away to people, or we stock them in somebody's pond that's looking for fish. About a month ago, I went to a fish rescue. I got a call from somebody, and they said, hey, we're moving out of our house. Can you come rescue our fish? I'm like, yeah, great. I'll be there saturday. Couldn't make a saturday. Went over there sunday. They were completely moved out. Gone. And it was a little 150 gallon preformed pond in a trailer court. So I was like, okay. They had a nice filter system on it, a lot of plants and this and that. There was over two dozen koi in that pond. I thought I'd go there. I was stocked up with tubs. I started catching these fish out, loading them in my tanks, and then I caught something that looked like because I'm not a tropical fish guy, I'm like, oh, crap, that's a piranha. And I was like, whoa, what's this? It wasn't shaped like a koi at all. And I was like, god, wash my fingers. And anyway, I threw it in the tubs. I was like, okay, I'll figure out something to do with this. That wasn't the only one. I caught two more.
Robbz: That's why they call you old three toes, right?
Greg: Yeah. And I texted the guy was like, okay, I got all your koi, but I am missing a finger from that piranha. And he texted me back. He's like, no, it's a pacu. So I harvested so out of the spawn. I took two dozen big koi. They were probably 14 inches, and then three pacu. So I call a local aquarium guy. He cleans aquariums for a living. His whole basement is aquariums stacked upon stacks. So I called him up, and he came and got these paku, and he was super happy with them. However, I could have probably used them to eat the allergy. I don't know much about them.
Robbz: So for those that are listening in the podcast, Pacu's are, again, another south african variety. They're very similar looking to a red belly piranha. They have a lot of the indications and markings, and they're invasive species in a lot of different places in the world that have been thrown into the wild, either on purpose or by accident. And the difference is, they're really omnivores. They will eat anything, and they have very human like, molar teeth that will grind but will also crush anything that they snails. They're very adaptive to their environment.
Jimmy: They'll eat acorns. If acorns fall out of the water, they'll eat acorns.
Greg: Wow.
Robbz: Very strong.
Greg: Actually, people might not know that koi have teeth as well in the back of their mouths that they grind up against a hard pallet.
Robbz: The pacu actually can get about the size of a tire as well.
Greg: Right.
Robbz: I apologize. One of the biggest ones they found is actually in the Mississippi river. Someone left, and they caught it around Minneapolis, and it was one of the biggest ones on record.
Greg: And that's what I was wondering, is the temperature range that paco would have went, because in our indoor fish building, which is heated, we could have put it in there. And I do have a problem. We get this algae, what they call it carpet algae. It might be about inch to two inches long, and it just like shag carpeting that grows all over the rubber liner that we have in our ponds and all the building. And now it's getting so thick that it's starting to clog up the filter systems and the drains. So I was thinking that might be a good animal to go in there and eat that and get rid of that.
Robbz: They definitely do a job that hair algae is pretty common in a lot of scenarios. We were just talking in another episode of what they do for aquarium treatment. So there's that. And also black beard algae that's much shorter, but bushier, dark colored algae. And I recommend just from another fish person to another American flag fish, if you can so have them. They don't necessarily last the winter, but they do a fantastic job of mowing that stuff up.
Greg: Sure. Another thing that will eat hair algae is tadpoles. Tadpoles are great at eating algae.
Robbz: Jimmy'S favorite.
Jimmy: Oh, man, I love tadpoles.
Greg: So that's my turtle.
Jimmy: That's kind of how I feel about them, too.
Greg: We have a cycle around here at the koi farm. The predators that we find in the ponds, usually every year, we have turtles, snapping turtles that show up, and they get caught right away, of course. And then I put them in a tank and they get fed frogs and tadpoles and anything else that I unwanted.
Jimmy: In the pond or any particular coy that dies that day.
Greg: Yeah, any particular koi like it's? It's pretty typical. When koi spawn, sometimes a female will die whether she's got egg and package and the eggs won't come out. Or tumors. We get tumors quite often, and I've talked to several people about that to see if it's something in the food. Maybe it's the fact that we're 2 miles from iowa's only nuclear power plant might have something to do with it.
Robbz: Oh, man.
Jimmy: Are these glokoy? Because we could have a new market.
Greg: They're not glokoy globe. I'd probably have a lot bigger market than I do have now. But anyways, we get tumors quite a bit. We keep a snapping turtle, and snapping turtle liver is my favorite delicacy. However, I did have tonight for dinner, I did have alligator meat, which is probably my most favorite meat.
Robbz: You were making Jimmy jealous snacking on it before the episode started.
Greg: That's right.
Robbz: He's still shaking his head. I still love gator.
Jimmy: Every time we go down South, I get gator and grits.
Greg: That's my grits. Now, listen, the best grits that I ever had was I was in the military, and we had some guys from Louisiana that were our cooks, and they made the best grits. And I have since tried to have grits everywhere that I have ever gone that would serve grits and have not come up with the same quality of grits that I had down in Louisiana when I was in the military from that Louisiana cook.
Robbz: There's something there. See, I went to a waffle house with Jimmy going to Florida, and that was some stuff. When you walk in, those give you lemonade. You didn't even order it right then you try to get whatever they want, and you didn't order grits. And you had a bowl shows up and you're not about to complain, you just eat it and realize that it's the most delicious breakfast food you can have.
Jimmy: The first time I was down in Florida and they gave me grits and I was not familiar. And she goes, oh, are you a yankee? And I go, Excuse me? And she goes, Are you from up north? I went, yeah. She goes, they're good, sweetheart. Just eat them. I said okay.
Greg: It depends on how people make them, because I would say it's like, oatmeal, my wife is yeah, multimeal. It depends on the consistency of how they make them. Actually, I have no sense of smell, so I don't taste food like other people taste food. And that's one reason why I can be an excellent fish farmer, is I can't smell the fish.
Jimmy: You don't know when something went bad?
Greg: No, I don't know when something went bad. I can't tell when the ammonia is in the air. My grandpa used to raise rabbits, and rabbits produce and in closed quarters, they produce a heck of a lot of ammonia. My dad it would just gag you.
Jimmy: My dad commercially raised rabbits when I was in high school. And we sold about 1200 a week to a restaurant type place up in northern North Dakota. And we sold rabbits upon rabbits upon rabbits. And to this day, if I see a rabbit, I just want to run it over. I'm sorry, rabbit loss.
Robbz: I'm sorry, rabbit loss.
Greg: We used to raise rabbit for butcher when I was a kid. And my grandpa raised them. He would actually take them and he would butcher them, grind them into burger and sell them to the local jivy store. I'm not sure how how do you.
Jimmy: Get away with that.
Greg: Was, yeah, 30 years ago.
Robbz: I think at this very moment, we have now lost the vegan cyclist as our fan.
Jimmy: He's probably just thinking, that's a great idea why you should be a vegan.
Robbz: You didn't have the Euro rabbits, gators or livers.
Greg: Now, I only eat free range animals. I try to only eat except for the alligator meat, which we have to buy, but we typically only eat free range meat. Whatever. I can go hunt and shoot, so at least I'm doing my part anyways to not make so much methane in the environment.
Robbz: Well, then you got to be careful with that free range. You're buying a nuclear plant, remember?
Greg: Right, we are. By the nuclear plant. The deer grow really big racks around here, and when you hit them with your truck, apparently they cause enough damage to create a totaled out vehicle.
Robbz: Well, that's why they feel angry, isn't it?
Jimmy: Absolutely.
Greg: Mass squared. They just must have a little bit of plutonium and those antlers must weigh them down a little bit. I did the calculations. It was like 16,000 foot pounds or newtons or something, whatever. The website told me that was 150 pound deer hitting a vehicle at 60 miles an hour. It was enough to stop me cold.
Robbz: Well, that's why, see, the insurance company just cut you a check and totaled it. They didn't want to deal with radioactive deer on your on your bumper.
Greg: Right? That's right. We don't want to have to we ran the thing on that. It's been raining, so we haven't had rain. As a fish farmer, obviously we want water for our ponds and we haven't had a lot of rain in Iowa here this summer. It's been really dry and the ponds have been going down. And then finally last night we got three inches of rain. And I woke up last night at 02:00 in the morning and I just sensed something was wrong. There's something wrong. I went out to the fish house. I neglected to put on any clothes other than my boxer briefs, I guess.
Robbz: Give us the visual. Please give us the visual.
Greg: Visual.
Jimmy: What color were your boxes?
Greg: It's 03:00 in the morning. I'm wearing black and gray striped boxer brief, sweet. I grab my umbrella and the light and I go out to the fish house and my pump house where all the pumps these are dry vault pumps, so they're not meant to get wet. They are flooded because the gutter on the back of the building we got three inches of rain last night in a period of about an hour and a half, 2 hours, and the gutter on the back of the building fell off and all the water went behind the building, went under the building and flooded this pump house. So I get my sump pump on, I pump all the water. Then I go to the garage and I'm still in my underwear. Of course it's dark, but we're out in rural Iowa, so nobody cares. We don't have street lights out here. I get some wire, I go to the back of the building, I wire everything up together and finally go. To bed. So that's what my night was like. No sleep. Running around in my undies, wiring electrical.
Jimmy: Items, standing in water. It sounds like a good time.
Robbz: So he'll be at the next barn Noble for his signature first edition of 50 Shades of Koi seeds of Koi.
Greg: So I'm operating on no sleep today, basically. So if I'm a little loopy, that's probably why you fit right in.
Robbz: Well, we appreciate that, Greg. And just to get back on track here oh, yeah. So I met you I met you, actually, from the Upper midwest Koi show. They try to do a show once a year, and this last year, they were unable to. Sadly, the venue was full of unspace. I think we found a new spot for this next year, but I still got to meet you there. And you had quite a selection of different koi to choose from, and it was a real treat. I got to learn a lot of different things, but the biggest thing I learned is the food that you choose to grow out, because these koi people don't really understand how koi grow. So koi can really grow up to 36 inches plus, depending on the variety of koi. And, again, they have no stomach. It's just all intestine, so they can eat every hour on the hour. So feeding is a real thought process with a lot of people. And how do you feed koi?
Greg: Right. Really, the key to growing koi, the way we do it, the natural way, is getting green water. Green water is the ticket to growing koi, because with green water, you produce water, Daphna and all the other zooplanktons, and you have to get those populations up to what I call critical mass, to where you've got enough of that food available, that when the koi hatch out, there will be enough there to feed them. The problem with the live food is that if they do get to such a mass I've actually had in a in a pond, I've had probably if you were to scoop out I i got a big net made. Of cheesecloth that my wife made. And you can get maybe £50 dry weight if you were just to scoop it up and take the water out of Daphne in a pond. In that size of a pond, let's say. 25,000 gallons and the Daphne themselves will start to produce ammonia, that there will be so many in the water and the oxygen levels go down. So sometimes you can lose a population like that. It can crash. But when koi start to eat, if there's enough live food, they prefer live food. And when they start to eat, they call it gut loading. They'll start eating so much that their belly will actually split open and their intestine or their gut will hang out of their body, and they just keep loading and loading and loading, and they can consume as much as possible because they grow so fast that within two days they've outgrown that and their belly readjusts. Using my knowledge to use daphnia and other live foods to feed koi, my daughter recently got some guppies. So I go out and I catch them some daphne. We still have some cultures out there. And I feed the guppies. Oh, they really love that. You watch them chase around mosquito larvae. Apparently I killed one. My daughter wasn't too happy with me because it seems I said, well, let's just see how much they want to eat. You know, koi, the more you feed them, the faster they grow. Apparently guppies, the more you feed them, the faster they die. My daughter says, what's that hanging off the guppy? Normally, a koi will have like, a poop trail hanging off of its butt as it swims around. And the guppy did that. I was like, okay, it's getting plenty to eat. It's going to grow fast. No, it died the day next day, so that's probably not too good. I tested the water, everything was good. But apparently you can't give guppies that much food. Their bellies were pretty distended.
Robbz: But anyways, guppies do have a stomach. So again, it's a very rare situation for people to overfeed. The first thing that happens when you overfeed anything is the ammonia will get your fish. But in situations like yours, that's extremely rare. They'll eat themselves to death. And that almost never happens in the normal aquarium trade. But with koi, after you get them past that size, what do you do to feed after adolescence?
Greg: Right? So after adolescents, we start off the food we use is aquamax. It's not a koi food. It's made by purina, and it's got the protein levels. They start off with a powder and then they go through aquamax, 100, 200, 300, 400, all the way up to 600. And the pellets get larger and larger incrementally as you go. And the protein on the smaller stuff starts off at 50%, I think for the 100, 200, 300. And then once you get to the 500, the protein goes to 41%, and the primary ingredient in it is fish meal. And the koi seems to like that. It takes a while to get used to when they're koi really want to eat live food. And if you try to switch them over, it takes about four weeks. They get to a certain size after about four weeks, there's no amount of daphne. They've eaten every bit of live food that you can give them, and you've got to get them onto something else. So you start them off with a powder, and sometimes to get them to eat the powder, I'll take snails. there'll be a lot of little snails in some of the tanks that I have around. Typically in the filter pits, they eat the kois poop. So I grab those snails and I'll grind them on a stone just between a couple of bricks I'll stone grind them, I'll mix that in with the powdered food and that will really give it some kind of taste that the koi will really go for. Also, when I do that, we get kind of an algae that grows on the side of the ponds. It's rubber liner ponds. We get some kind of just an algae or might even be a bit of a bacteria. I'm not sure what grows on there. I'll take a piece and I'll scrape that and the coil will come over. It might even be like, I can't think of the word right now, the algae that they like so much, spiritual algae. It might be a little bit of spirulina in it, but it's growing on the sides of the tank. I'll scrape that off and sometimes if that's been in the sun, like the pond level goes down and comes back up, scrape that off, they'll just come around your fingers and just gobble that up. So usually that's what I have to do to get them onto pellets. Once you get them onto eating pellets, then it's just easy. You just keep feeding them and feed them and feed them and depends on how many fish you have as to how many pellets you need to go through a day. And this year we had a tremendous hatch. We got three ponds that are a quarter acre in size. And you never know a lot of this food, you have to order it ahead of time. You never know, do I need four bags of food or I need 40 bags of food? And I was super low on food. We had such a tremendous hatch this year. That the other thing with the live feed, sometimes less is more. When you have less coy you'll actually get a better result. If you have a pond, let's say 25,000 gallons, and you try to raise 3000 koi in it, you'll get a better result than if you try to raise 20,000 koi. Because you'll get 20,000 to 100,000 koi will hatch out from from one spawn, from a female or two females. And if there's not enough live food, the koi will eat each other. You'll actually see a koi, two koi from the same size, one will just come up and grab the other guy by the tail and he'll just start gobble them up to him tail and you'll see a fish swimming around with another fish in its mouth.
Robbz: That's crazy. We don't really get these perspectives in our hobby trade at all. So this is fascinating.
Jimmy: It is very fascinating.
Greg: Well, and you'll see guppies will turn around and eat their own offspring sometimes too. Sometimes you should have them in a cage so that the babies can swim out or whatever. So if you have too many koi hatch out and not enough Daphne, it's hard getting that balance. I do raise brine shrimp on occasion. I have a couple of cans of it around. And when I say I raise brine shrimp, I raise it in those big five gallon water jugs where I use like tablespoons, three or four tablespoons per jug to grow out and that would be one serving. So we try not to do that because that's an expensive route. I like to do it the other way. The other thing about live food is if Daphne sense fish, they must have something. Where they sense a fish is hormones or something. They will mold and create egg casings and die. And you can lose the whole batch that way too. So sometimes you don't want to put the fish in too late or too soon to make the eggs hatch. You get the Daphne population going and then you put the eggs in at just the right time. So that's what I've learned over the years, is getting that natural food. And then, like I said, once we go to that, we switch. The typical food that we feed is probably like almost 2. That's a real good food. It's like 50% protein, almost fifty cents a pound, and that's a real good food that we feed. And we probably went through in a quarter acre pond. We might have 100,000 fish in that pond and we can go through a five gallon bucket a day is not even close to feeding them as much as they should eat.
Jimmy: Yeah, that's incredible.
Greg: Normally, normally when you a Japanese breeder or any kind of breeder, if you get so many fish hatch out, like I said, less is more. So you need to call down the herd and just pick out the best koi and grow them to their potential rather than trying to grow everything. But the logistics of trying to catch 100,000 fish and sort through them, the manpower that it takes is a lot of times you can't do that on a regular basis. There's a lot of work in that. So I typically will just let them grow to their first year and then the next spring will harvest the pond and that's when we'll sort through them. Up until about two years ago, we've been selling coin for breeding, selling for 20 years. This is our 20 year anniversary. We've sold every fish we could produce for about the first 16 to 17 years. So this will be the first time that I've had so many fish that now I don't have buyers for everything and I'll have to really start sorting things out and focus a little more on the quality of the fish. We always try to focus on the quality, but focus a little more on the quality. And we do find markets, like people who are looking for feeder fish in the aquarium industry, people who have turtles or they're just looking for a lower grade koi. We do find a market for those koi. I try not to destroy any fish. I always try to find a market for them. Somebody will want them. Just that way, everybody has a chance. I try to make koi affordable for everybody.
Jimmy: Greg, I had a quick question that's.
Greg: Been in my mind anyways. That's what we use for the food. It's aquamax by Purina. Our purina dealer is just fantastic. The only problem is they sell it in 50 pound bags, so we typically will rejug it. And I recycle jugs. We go through a lot of lemonade, and I recycle the lemonade jugs, and we rejug that into two and a half pounds to three and a half pound jugs, and we resell it at the koi shows. And we do ship that food sometimes to people. It's a really good food. It's a good, high quality food. It's not a koi food. But koi are just a fish. They don't need a food that says koi specifically.
Robbz: Well, again, you're also raising them at a very young age, so they need a lot of protein. Other older koi, they have a different type of diet. Again, they're a carp, so you're getting them the high protein age. And my big question is from that egg. Again, you're in Toddsville, Iowa, so you do have hard winters. So from that hatch, when is that hatch? How long until a dormant season would go, what is that growth look like? From egg to fish?
Jimmy: Yeah. How much growth do you get in that first year?
Greg: Right. So growth can vary based on how many fish you have. But let's go with best growth. In a best case scenario, we could do a spawn. Sometimes we are in Iowa, sometimes we never have ice on our ponds. This was the first year ever since I've had a pond, 25 years that we've had ice on the pond after st. patrick's day. Usually the pond is completely thought out around St. patrick's day. On or before a few days before we have gotten spawns before. In April, we typically look for a full moon, the spawn to happen around a full moon if the temperature is right. But let's say we got a spawn going in May is pretty typical for most of our spawns. And that fish will hatch in three days to four days. If the daphne is good, that fish will be an inch long in probably three to four weeks. And once it starts eating pellets, I can have it by September, October, I can have that fish almost to nine inches.
Robbz: That's incredible.
Greg: Yeah, that's very incredible. And live food is the key. They'll eat pellets. And the other thing is, too, if we were wanting to grow a fish, if we were wanting to super grow a fish, like, let's say you're growing fish for production, which you grow them at kind of a slower pace than if you were to grow a fish. For example, if I see a fish that's breeding stock worthy, like, one of the fish that we have is our famous fish. It's called the show chiba is a unique fish, most unique fish in the United States. There's not another one like it. That fish, I realized from a very early size when it was about two inches, that it was a special fish. So I pulled that fish, I put in the building, I put it in a tank and I grew it. And when I grew that fish for potential then I feed that fish as much as it can eat nonstop. I go by the tank every hour. It's got to have pellets in there waiting for it, optimum water quality and all that. And that fish could even hit twelve inches in six months. They say carp can grow at an inch a month. But we can grow them faster than that on live food because they will eat more aggressively on live food especially than they would on pellets. Pellets, they get full. And the other thing about dry pellets, when a fish choose, this is one thing if you want to help your fish to grow faster is soak those pellets. You can even soak them in things that give them additional vitamins like orange juice or some other things. But soak those pellets ahead of time. Koi do have a hard pellet that they can grind their food up but that takes moisture to get the food soft and to grind it up. Then when it gets into their gut, it's also used in moisture. So if you soak the food ahead of time and make it soft, the koi will be able to digest it a lot better and it'll be a lot less work on the fish when it's eating it. So that's one other thing you can do to help them to eat normally. A fish will come up, a koi will come up, it'll eat a pellet and it'll run away. And if the pellets a certain size because it's got to go and got to grind it up and get it going through the system before it can grab another one. So it can only have so much room in its mouth to work those pellets. So that's just kind of a tip to get people to help their koi to grow. And then we do leave our koi outside for the winter, which they do grow some during the winter. They will eat some allergies if it's available. But special fish, fish that are pick of the litter or future breeding potential will bring those in the building. And the building is heated to almost 80 degrees and the water stays around 70 and those fish will be able to grow all season. So by the time the fish has turned one years old in May of the following year, we would call those jumbotosai where they could be twelve to 14 inches long at, at that rate. So they do grow very fast. The other trick to growing up fast like the Japanese do is they put females only in a pond. And the problem with females is when they start to smell a male, once they get to a certain size, they'll start developing eggs and they'll start wanting to spawn, and sexual maturity really slows down a koi's growth. So when you're growing a koi, if you can keep the females in their own pond, they don't smell males, they won't develop eggs. They'll spend more of their energy growing rather than developing eggs and wanting to spawn.
Robbz: So I've heard that same thing. I apologize. I've heard that same thing with a lot of show specialists. That's generally where I come from. The side of the hobby is going to other places like midwest Koi show and yeah, keeping the females together. And they also have electronic feeders that they have for special tanks, either for one individual koi or feeders all around to give them a diverse set. And just like you said, softness matters. So they'll purposely prep their koi food, and it gives them every 30 minutes a batch of food, and it disappears. It's really amazing that they get fed on a clock, right?
Greg: And like I said, tricking them with the snail juices or the other thing. Once koi go from Daphne, the next larger size food that's available is a scud shrimp, which is about a quarter inch long, and they're kind of a neat little shrimp that eats plant matter, but they're really hard to grow in large numbers and harvest them. However, in our other farm that's 25 minutes away, that one, we can go there. And you just sift a net through the sand and through some weeds, and you can get quite a few of those to feed koi, too, but any kind of live food. When I'm prepping my breeders to breed in the spring, the night crawlers will come out. The night crawlers will come out in the first spring rains, and they'll spawn. You'll see them all over the blacktop roads. A lot of people will see night crawlers out. I go out and I collect as many night crawlers as I can, and I feed those to my koi, just pounds and pounds of them in the weeks preceding spawning to give them a lot of live food and good high quality protein. When they eat a night crawler, all that comes out. When they're done digesting that is like a skin they digest. There's very high digestibility and night crawlers for koi. So anytime you can feed them live food, they're going to feed more aggressively on that and grow faster.
Robbz: So what's the approximate age? Again, you're breeding the koi. Do you have any koi that you have that don't breed and you've grown up? In your experience, what do you see? For age?
Greg: Yeah, for age, the oldest coy we had was 20 and 21, and those were breeding animals, obviously. But the one that I have now, males typically will do a lot better breeding the oldest male I think now that I have is 17, and he's still very active in breeding. He's in there as aggressively as younger males. But because I've only had the koi for like 20 some years, that's about the oldest koi that we've had. But I've heard of them 35 years old. There was a nursery or something that got their koi robbed and hey, Rob, that's your name. And they said that their fish were 35 years old. So I know they can live that long.
Robbz: But I didn't do it.
Greg: We do you didn't do it. I see skin cancer quite a bit in some of the coy as well, like skin blemishes and uv exposure.
Robbz: How do you treat them?
Greg: Like, well, you can't really. I mean, you can dip them with iodine or anything like that or kind of scrape it off. But now koi are not meant to. Like, we keep them in very clear water pond, and some people don't have a lot of shade in their ponds. Shade is pretty important for koi that I see that koi that are kept in clear water with not a lot of shade, their colors will decrease. And one way that I did this was I would keep koi outside in the pond for the summer where we bred them. But then those special fish that were growing, we would keep those inside and there was less sun in the building. And it seems like sun breaks down the keratins or the color in their skin and skin cancer and can cause some skin issues. You do see your koi hide during the heat of the day. They like to go and hide under the plants or in the shade. So I think that affects them also to try to keep them healthy. As my koi started getting 2021 years old, you started noticing that their skin was losing some of the luster and that quality of the skin was aging. Like human skin ages, you could tell that the skin was aging and it wasn't healing as well as it would when they were younger anyways.
Robbz: But that's fascinating. So I've seen a couple of different cancers. There's really tumor, but I have seen a couple of other under the scale cancers. And as far as their treatments, number one, like you said, shade prevents it. But I don't know about koi. Koi, again, have a different type of reaction to a lot of different treatments. But you can certainly talk to your veterinarian about if you have other large fish with the same issue and they'll help you give injections and they have a scrape treatment. They do. But again, I would not consider doing that to your fish unless you talk to your local veterinarian.
Jimmy: Leaving toward the professionals.
Greg: We used to do fish, had problems. We do antibiotic injections and we'd do some different things with them in a tumor situation, too, like ovarian tumors or some kind of cyst I think, like you said, it's better to have a veterinarian. If you wanted to, you could do surgery on that fish and take that cyst out. It depends. Sometimes I've seen where I've had tumors the size of my fist come out of a fish and the tumor will just grow so large that eventually it pushes out. It'll push out the organs and the fish will die from organ failure simply because it just pushed out. It took up so much space. But one other fish we had the fish, it was just bloated and I can feel the fish and I kind of know whether it's a tumor or whatever. The fish is real soft in the abdomen and I knew that it had a tumor, something was blocking it, but I couldn't tell. Why was this fish living so long? And it ended up I do an autopsy in any fish that dies and the fish had a tiny tumor. But what the tumor was doing, it was blocking not enough of a fish doctor to know, but it was blocking something and the fish was producing large volumes of blood. So the reason the fish was bloated up was it was body cavity was full of blood. And the only reason I can think that fish lived so long is the amount of blood that it had also meant that it had a lot more white blood cells and that contributed to more immunity from or more ability to fight, whatever it was. But that fish lived. But it was like I said, it bloated up quite large. The other problem we have go ahead, I apologize.
Robbz: There's a lot of resources online and I believe I've used a couple in the past like koi vet.com, and there's a ways to treat bigger animals than there is smaller. And all my veterinarian, all he does is cats and dogs. Well, you'd be surprised if you talk to them what treatments they would offer and different medications that you can feed to them orally to try to help boost or prevent some issues. But tumor treatments, especially, like you said before, you had one of your fish where the ovary pumped right out. Well, in some situations you'll see a large, particularly like a 30 inch coy have this massive growth in this lower region and that especially later in their life, either their egg bound or like you said, have ovarian tumors. And there are procedures where it's literally clove oil the treatment for anesthesia open it, cut the coy, stitch them back together, treat with hydrogen peroxide and stuff can be done. So don't just assume that these particular animals has a tumor, there's nothing I can do and write it off. There are treatments, there is help and certainly look those up. I know again, coy vet, there's a lot of help lines, YouTube videos, but again, veterinarians don't just rule them off because all they just work on cows, right?
Greg: Yeah, we have a vet. A vet came to our pond club. He joined our pond club and would come and talk to people and it's very valuable information. And the other part about female koi is hormones affect spawning quite a bit. And if the hormone levels are high in the pond, a female koi won't want to spawn and that can lead to egg impaction. So it's good for people to do water changes on a regular basis and dilute those hormones. A lot of people say, I've never seen my koi spawn. My coy is fat, why won't it spawn? It might just be that a lot of people, they don't do water changes, they just top the pond off. It's just like an aquarium. If the water evaporates and you just keep topping it off, you're not getting rid of the pollutants, you're not diluting anything. So it's really important for koi's health and fish health in general to dilute those and give them fresh water changes on a regular basis.
Robbz: This happens in a lot of different species. There's an expert, Gary lange, and he's known as the king of rainbow fish. He's done a lot of research in one of the few gems that really inspired a lot of different species to come to the aquarium trade. And he'll document these fish in their natural habitats, trying to follow breeding cycles, color patterns, and notice that every time after a rain is the most common time and of course, temperature, moon alignments. But rain is the biggest factor for a lot of fish, especially in the Amazon. That, again, dilute those hormones, right?
Greg: And PH shift too, from the rain will also affect fish. Sudden changes in PH will definitely drive spawning. And most people, I don't know if they know how koi spawn, but female koi, when she wants to spawn, it's completely voluntary. They release a hormone from their pituitary when they decide to spawn and that starts the eggs into a labor process.
Robbz: Where is the pituitary, Glenn? Located on the koi itself.
Greg: Medulla oblongata somewhere up there in the brain.
Robbz: Kumbaya so is it similar, just for my benefit here, is it similar to goldfish, where you actually see the spots on their gill plate?
Greg: Male koi will definitely get a raspiness to their gill plates. Not as pronounced as goldfish. Goldfish is definitely visible, like white, little prickly things. Very similar to, we have minnows at the farm also, and minnows get these prickly things all over their heads, male minnows, but the goldfish will definitely get those. But koi is just more of a raspiness to their gill plates. And as soon as the female releases the hormone, the males will definitely just start chasing around like, hey, it's go time, and should be like, no, wait, I just started labor get a wait. But they'll typically barometric pressure affects them, too. So as we talked about that rainstorm, and rain is coming before the rain even comes. They know. The precursor to that is that barometric pressure shifts, and somehow they'll sense that Koi have a tremendous lateral line array, a sensor. And I tell people, it's like, you know how our new cars have all those backup sensors that you just have the thing that tells you you got something near this or something near that? I'm not sure how Coy see, I see they see like the comic book character daredevil, where he taps the stick and sees the vibrations.
Robbz: There you go.
Jimmy: Wow.
Robbz: Yeah, there's fun they use for that movie.
Greg: Well, compared to the way we see, coy might actually think we're blind. Sure, they can see with their eyes, but I think that they feel the environment more than anything because they're a river fish. And like we were talking about, with sun damage, they're meant to be, like, swimming in the river with darkened waters. Can't see anything.
Robbz: Digging in the mud.
Greg: Digging in the mud. They will sense worms and crayfish digging in the mud by the vibration underground. So that's one way. But anyways, how that leads to the barometric pressure. I'm not sure how they sense that barometric pressure, but that will then get them to a rains coming. They'll go ahead and release the hormone from their pituitary. So that way, when the rain comes and potential flooding, like what we've got going on at the farm right now, that they will be ready to lay those eggs and be right there at the optimum time. But a female can hold her eggs. If she decides, I'm not laying my eggs, something's not right, she will hold her eggs and won't lay them. But they do sell a carpituitary extract where they sell that hormone. And you can inject a koi. And we've tried that before where you inject it, but it's like $300 a bottle to do that to inject a koi. And we've tried doing that. The artificial spawning method, where you put the kois, you got to dry them all off, and you put the koi's eggs in a bowl, and then you strip out the mail, and you put his sperm with them, and you stir it all up. And there's a special way to do it. We do have one fish that we've still got that we did an artificial spawning with that we put the eggs in a tank, so we knew, okay, this is how we did it. So we've tried that, too. But you can do that artificially. But I try to spawn our fish all natural every year. We just try to do it naturally. They always go out to 100% fresh water, and they've been cooped up in the fish building all winter. So they go out to that freshwater. I can guarantee the fish will spawn within 24 hours unless there's something physically wrong with that fish.
Robbz: During breeding, do you use, say, breeding mops? What other tools do you use to make sure that's accomplished?
Greg: Right? So I've invented my own. There's some product that we use like filter brushes or not filter brushes, but there's a green filter, a green spawning rope that's commercially sold. That's a really good rope. But then I've invented my own because that's fairly pricey and I need so much of it. When we're doing spawning, we'll have typically a quarter acre pond. We'll need to throw eggs from about five or six females into that, and that'll be over three or four days. And so I need almost 30 foot long by two foot wide worth of spawning ropes, which gets expensive. So I came up with what I call the bickle bio rope, which we use for spawning. And around here, they have big round bales of hay, and I've got an example of them on my website. But this is a plastic mesh that comes out of the machine and wraps around a big bale of hay. Well, when the farmers are done with it, they wrap it up into a ball, they throw in a pile and they burn it, which we don't like seeing people burn junk around here, but that's pretty typical. I came up with this rope that I would pull this out, and my wife taught me how to crochet. So I would use my hand as a loop and I would crochet this into a rope. And it turns out to be really good filter material. And I started using this filter material first, and then I started using a spawning material, and it's got all kinds of little fibers in it, and it really mimics natural aquatic plant growth underwater. And so I use that quite extensively when I'm spawning because it's big long ropes, and we stake those out in the pond, and it keeps the fish's eggs nice and far away so that when we don't get a lot. The fungus is a big problem in fish eggs, so you want to keep the eggs as far away from each other as possible so that a fungus does happen. You don't get too much of it going on and kill the whole batch of eggs. That's what we use primarily.
Robbz: I'm actually on your website right now, and you have a full tutorial on your bio rope.
Greg: Full tutorial.
Robbz: Go ahead again. bacall that's bickal.com. And underneath the Category 1 second here, DIY, you have a section called Bio rope, and you have a video on there explaining in detail. And do you sell this to the public?
Greg: I don't sell it anymore because it just takes so long to braid it up and to go out and collect it from the farmers. The other reason why I didn't want to sell it is had I gotten a bad batch, say a farmer had maybe some weed killer or something that accidentally leaked onto that. So we didn't want to sell it just in case we didn't get it clean enough. And I didn't want the liability that came along with selling it, but it's excellent filter material. It's got a high void space to surface area for bacteria to grow. So it's excellent filter material as well as a spawning material for the fish. So it just really works really well. And as you look for material, a lot of times it's fairly expensive and bacteria will grow on anything. So as a way to recycle something that the farmers would normally burn, I could go get it and recycle it. So that's one thing. I try to be environmentally conscious, I guess, and recycle reuse when I can.
Robbz: Well, that's fantastic. So before we leave the process, so again, we went through the breeding process and do you ever have issues I've heard with koi breeders about jumps? Like, if you're in a normal, not normal size, you're in a large pond space for where you do breeding, but do you have any jumping issues or stories?
Greg: Right. We did have a problem this year. We had a fish die. So I was talking about the hormone levels in the pond, and we do spawnings in order, but we've only got a few spawning ponds here. We've got like four ponds here. Each of them are about 25,000 gallons to spawn in. And we had set up a pond. We want the female to spawn. I couldn't get the female to spawn because the hormone levels are getting too high. So when that happens, we do water changes. We try treating the water with certain things to burn the hormone off. And I couldn't get the female to spawn, so we threw her in an empty pond with three males. Right away, boom, she spawned. Normally we would hatch in that pond, but we just throw her in there and we'll spawn her out. That way she started spawning. I caught her up and I moved her to the big pond, because the big pond had more of the specialized fish that I wanted to breeder with, while the male that was in there, it was probably 20 inches, sparkly scales. It wasn't a show fish or anything, but it would have made nice babies. That fish went crazy looking for her. He could smell her. He was swimming all around the pond. where's this female at? He's wanting to spawn with her. He can't find her. He ends up I was in with a customer because I went out there and I saw the fish swimming around funny, and he was looking all over for the female, and I was like, I'll catch him later and throw him back in the big pond. I came back out later and that fish had jumped out. He just looked in his quest to find that female, he had jumped out. And I tried cpr on the fish. I tried mouth to mouth resuscitation on Blow Air. Yeah, one time we had a bunch of girls over at the farm and we did a Kiss My Koi challenge and we had that on Instagram. So anyways, you just switch air into get their gills to fluff out a little bit, and then you put them in the water and roll the fish back and forth. And I tried massaging the heart from underneath the chest and tried doing that to do some cpr on it. But that fish must have had a heart attack or something. It just was dead, broke its heart.
Robbz: Damn it.
Greg: Normally if a fish isn't dead until it's really dried up, you can put it in the water and as long as you can kind of any kind of a gill movement or anything on it you can get it to come back pretty easily. And that fish was nothing, it was still wet, there was nothing I could do for that fish. But we get jumpers on occasion and a lot of times I see people building these raised koi ponds oh, raised coy ponds with glass walls and I'm like, you know, cold jump. It's rare that they'll do it, but they do jump, especially if water parameters change. The PH a little funny or the nitrites might spike or something happens with your water quality because the rain can really do some funny things with your water. You will get jumpers like that on occasion but typically we don't have them jump out but you have to protect them while they're spawning because they will be a little crazy and not pay attention to their surroundings whatsoever when they're spawning. So you want to make sure that a lot of people have skimmers in there you want to make sure that the skimmer is blocked so that the koi won't accidentally just fall into that when they're spawning and get stuck in there and die.
Robbz: So again, just to go through the whole process you breed, you're using your own spawning ropes, you have again, daphne ponds essentially that you've prepped and prepared.
Jimmy: Are you creating your own daphne cultures? Is that something that's natural?
Greg: Yeah, we have some tanks that are just set up for daphne cultures, our seed tanks. We don't do anything else with the tanks. So then we just fill them with wall water and we'll put some fertilizer in there to get them started and then we'll transfer cultures around. And so then once a pond has been full and ready to go, I can start catching Daphne up. And usually I can catch almost a pound just scooping a net around pretty easily. I've got 800 gallon tanks, 3800 gallon tanks, those are rrc tanks and I can usually catch a pound of daphne with just a three or four second scoop around in the pond. That's how much daphne will get established. But like I said, you have to be careful to that you don't start getting low oxygen levels or ammonia levels because you can lose the whole batch very quickly. They'll just molt and die and you'll lose it. You'll have to start over. But yes, we start off with our own daphne cultures and then you have to time that daphne very specifically to make sure that the daphne don't smell the koi and the daphne have a good environment to grow and produce so that way they're there when the koi are ready to eat them. But yet you want to have enough daphne. I call it critical mass. You want to make sure that the pond usually you go out by flashlight at night is the best way to see how much zooplankton and daphne that you have in there is how much stuff is moving in the water and what's the ratio of water to the daphne to make sure you have enough in there.
Robbz: So you grow mount during the summer and when and how do they go to market? I'm assuming that you sell as low as three inches, right?
Greg: Yeah, actually we sell a one to two inch. We'll sell very small and then normally we don't sell a fish the first year unless we're having an event. Like this year we had an event and we let people pull fish right out of the mud pond that were hatched just in May and June. So we let them pull fish out we're an inch to two inches. But typically we will grow a fish a whole season and then we'll either let it set in the pond over winter is typically the best in the big mud ponds. It's pretty healthy to leave mouth at all winter and then we'll harvest them in the spring and that's when they'll be available for sale. And on the higher quality koi we may save out 1000 to 2000 or more. Depends on the amount of space and the demand in the market for larger koi will save out some of the higher quality little Koi and we'll grow them to the second season and then we'll make them available in the spring of the next year when they're probably like twelve to 14 inches, maybe nine inches and larger. And those ponds we've got automatic feeders. You fill it with a 50 pound bag and we've got it to kick off on different times to feed the fish just based on how many fish are there and how much feed do they need. We try to make sure we feed them at a steady pace that they're growing fast but not too fast where you can't afford to feed them that much to get them to a certain size.
Robbz: So you're in a particular situation where again, most core farmers wholesale, but you also do retail. You'll either sell direct to the customer and then you were saying that you have a retail shop, is that correct?
Greg: Right, yeah, that's how we started off. How we started selling koi actually was the first year that we bred koi we had so many we put the koi out in the pond and they bred on their own we had so many that we put it in the Penny saver, which is just like a little ad newspaper. We put them in there 20 years ago and we had 50 to 100 fish that we had. And people came and bought them and they bought them, took them home in buckets. And next year they called us up and you say, hey, you got more fish and my friend wants some fish. I'm like, yeah. And so that's how we actually started selling koi, was doing it that way. And then as that started becoming popular and people we wanted, like I said, we sold every koi we could produce the first few years. And so then I build another pond, somebody got rid of a swimming pool, we'll put that up, we'll hatch koi. We try to hatch 500 to 1000, whatever we could come up with. And we went from selling 50 to 100 to 400 to 1000 to 2000 to 5000 fish a year. It's kind of where we've gotten to now. It's just grown every year. And like I said, this is the biggest hatch and the most amount of fish. I've only had this new property, our wholesale property, I've only had it six years and it was just flat out pasture grass with a little crick running through it. And I bought it just for the water sources that it had there. And now we've got a half acre pond on there. We've got four quarter acre ponds and two 8th of an acre pond with four more quarter acre ponds under construction ready to go in the next year or so. That's how fast we're growing. And now we're trying to really move into the wholesale and find wholesale markets so that we can produce a fish two to three inches, have it ready that size to move in a market, empty a pond out, get another spawn going. Because really, the luler fish are what people are really wanting now. We used to sell ten years ago, we used to sell a lot more larger fish. Everybody at the shows, the koi shows, all wanted larger fish. Now everybody just wants the smallest, cheapest fish they can get. They still want some good colors and they want the butterfly. So that's kind of the shift in the market. Maybe with the market going up and people having a little more money to spend in their pockets, maybe we'll see large fish make a comeback. But growing a fish two to three years to get them to a certain size, you got to have the market for that. Otherwise it's not going to be worth your while.
Robbz: So what type of koi do you offer? And again, I'm on your website and I've worked with you in the past. I know that you can offer the small mix, that's what you're trying to get for the wholesale. But just so your customers know they're listening, our potential customers on the podcast again, you have the butterfly koi, but what other types of koi? You said you had shoes. Do you have shinrons? What types do you carry?
Greg: Well, our breeding efforts are focused on three different types of koi, which are the most popular. We focus on the three colored koi, which is the shoe and the sake. Then we also focus on blue koi, which is asagi and Shishui. And then we focus on yellow koi and that's Yamobuki. And when we breed those kois, we also breed we cross breed them with other varieties. So by breeding a three colored koi, you'll also get a white and red koi. When we breed yellow, we produce that with a yellow and white or a yellow, black and white. So you'll get all these different offshoots of the other colors in a mix. So that gives us a really good variety of koi to offer, and those colors are the hottest selling koi. But then we have all these other varieties there with it, which makes for a nice mix when people are looking.
Robbz: For koi, that's fantastic. So my favorite koi, again, I'm weird, I'm all about Chagoi just because they are a bit bigger, they have a different type of appetite, and they also have a different attitude. They're generally tea colored, earth toned. Do you have any of those? Just for my own benefit here.
Greg: Right. The problem with Chagoi is when you produce with a single colored fish and a chagoy is a dark fish, so it's hard putting a pattern on a dark fish. Most people want a patterned fish. The opposite of a Chagoi is a sorgoy, which is a silver or a mouse gray koi. And typically you want to breed that koi with a patterned fish. You will get some chagoys. You'll get a mix of that. But when you breed chagoy, when we did several years, we've got some jumbo Chago, which we lost to one of our jumbo chagoy this year because it didn't want to spawn. We didn't put the koi out to spawn until last because they produce so many just there's no variety there. They're all chagoy. They might be a tea colored or a coffee colored Chago. There's kind of some offshoots of the color there, but that's all you get is a pond full of Chagoi. And so then we'll have way too many Chago. So we'll breed chagoy one year, and then we'll have so many Chago that we won't really need to breed for three or four years. And that's what happened as we bred Chagoi. And then it was like, okay, we got way too many Chagoi. Let's not breed those for a few years. And then we've sold all the Chago, and now people are like, hey, but I want a chagoy. So this year we threw them back into the mix, and we'll have Chagoi, and we also have Soragoi, which is the gray fish, and then also ochiba shiguru, which is a gray fish with a bronze pattern, which the Japanese say is like fallen leaves on water. So that's been a real popular fish. And doing samplings in the quarter acre pond. We've got a lot of those in there, which some of them are scaled, some are scaleless, some are the ginren, which is the sparkly scales. We focus a lot on the sparkly scaled fish as well. And then Juice is try to do everything in butterfly. We throw butterfly into the mix, and that you'll just get everything with the butterfly, so that always works out well.
Jimmy: Perfect.
Robbz: So is there anything that you feel that we miss? I feel like we get we got through the process. We got age, growth, feeding types. I feel like we've really dipped into a process that, frankly, we don't get a picture of often.
Jimmy: We need a part two of this eventually, too. I think there's so much great information here, I can't even believe, as I'm taking notes here, of all the different things that I've learned this evening. And I think we need a part two again.
Robbz: We need a DIY episode of just how to do all your tricks. Your website is impressive again. That's pickle.com, that's bickal.com, and you have an entire library of DIY instructions. It's a wealth of information. And we definitely have to have you on the podcast again.
Greg: Right, well, I appreciate you guys having me. And I started out originally. I sold everything that was on my website. I sold in a book on cd way back in the day. I used to sell that online, and after I had sold so many thousands of copies of it, I finally just made it available on my website. I'm a full time software developer. I'm just a part time coy breeder. It's a full time job also, but it's my passion job, so I've written my own website. I've done all my website on my own website work. When you do websites fulltime for a living, you don't try to put too much flair into your own website. I guess I'm kind of lazy about it, but I try to do everything on the website. There's so many articles out there that people can go see, build their own ponds, the proper filtration, and how to make hoy low cost and low maintenance. So I appreciate you guys having me online, and this has been a lot of fun.
Robbz: No problem. So one more thing. You also do shows. So what are some of the next shows that we'll be able to see you, Adam, assuming that will be next spring, right?
Greg: Yeah. The show circuit is pretty much done for this year, and this year we actually just did a show in St. Louis, and that was the first time we were able to get into that show. We try to get into any show that we can get into as long as it's decent driving distance. But next year. In the spring, we'll be looking at the Chicago show, which is usually held in the middle of June. We try to get into other shows if we can. There's a show in louisville, Kentucky, that's in May. There's some shows in Colorado in August. We're going to look into that. The show in St. Louis. The show in Minnesota. The funny story, the place where we used to have the show in Minnesota was at a greenhouse, and we used to also sell koi to them wholesale. Well, they've gotten completely out of koi. They're no longer hosting the Koi show, so they're going to have to find a new spot for that show. But I've heard through the grapevine, don't want to get myself into trouble, that they may be going into the medical marijuana business growing or whatever. That's just some rumor that I've heard. So that's probably going to be more lucrative up there than them hosting our koi show. I'm sure they'll find a spot for koi in Minnesota, right? I'm sure they'll find a new spot for coy in Minnesota next year, and we will definitely be there. We try to, like I said, make it to any show that people have us. I provide koi at a price, which I feel coy do sell for more money than I sell them for. But I want people to afford koi. And I say we've got a Koi for every budget. And if somebody's just looking for a cheap Koi, they just want something to start with, we will find them a Koi. It might only be missing one fin or have a scale out of place, but we'll definitely find a coy for everybody.
Jimmy: Hey, Greg, I got a quick question for you. rob's and I just went down to bloomington, down in Minneapolis for a Koi auction. Auction? Yeah. And I've been on one large Koi, and I pushed out and didn't go the whole length. It went for about what was Rob? 180?
Robbz: Yeah, about one and 180.
Jimmy: Anyway, it was a beautiful white and red coy, but it had the most beautiful robin eggs. Blue eyes.
Greg: Right.
Jimmy: When I'm looking online and stuff, trying to get some information about what is it only the red and white ones that have the blue eyes?
Greg: No, actually, that's kind of a breeding secret, too, is if the koi has blue eyes. When you're breeding for a white and red coy, if it has blue eyes, most likely in its genetics and its bloodline, it's a three colored Koi because the blue eyes are coming from the three colored coy. So as breeders are sorting through their young coy, if they come across that blue eyes in a fish that they're trying to produce white and red only they won't select that fish because they don't want later, as the fish develops, it'll bring up small black spots. Sometimes they're called shimmies, but otherwise it can be spots of different size. But it'll really detract from the beauty of the koi. So sometimes we'll stay away from that. It just kind of when we're sorting fish, we'll look at that and we'll say, hey, we're not going to pick that fish to use just because it's going to not be a good one. Actually.
Robbz: Might have been whites in the auction.
Greg: That's right. It could have been a three colored koi and lost its black. Which water quality changes koi. All koi do not look the same. And what fish may look like out in the farm in the very soft water that comes from surface water in the ponds versus the deep well water that we use here at the farm in our tanks indoors, it changes the fish's look. And sometimes a fish can gain color or lose color based on the water that it's in.
Jimmy: Yeah, I just absolutely fell in love with that fish. I kicked myself for not bringing home that fish. rob's egged me on to go up to $200, and I pushed out.
Greg: I actually brought home a fish from St. We went to the St. Louis show this year, and like I said, we've only got three koya originally left from Japan. And we overheard some guys talking at the show that this guy is like, I want to sell this koi. We were going around the show tanks looking all the fishies like, yeah, I want to sell this one because it's a male. I was like, oh, hello. And I went over and looked at the koi, and it was a beautiful white and red koi, and it had one young champion at the show, so it was a show winner. And I was like, I looked at the fish, and it's a Japanese import, and I was thinking, it's going to be one thousand five hundred dollars to two thousand five hundred dollars fish pretty easy. And I was like, I definitely buy it from you. Like I said, we don't typically bring new fish in. We try to keep our quarantine procedures and everything pretty strict. Otherwise, we brought in the butterfly, you know, to breed that, but so anyways, I went back to my booth, and we're working solenoid, and the guy's like, hey, I think if you offered him $250, he'd take it. And I was like, sold. So that's going to be our new flagship fish. Anyway, it's a male. It's a jumbo fish. It's only like, 14 to 15 months old, and it's a young male, but it's already like 16 inches long, maybe maybe 20 inches long. I forget. We didn't really measure it when I got home. I just know the tub that it was in. But once that fish hits two years old, three years old, he's big enough to put with some of the females. We'll try him out this spring. We're going to put him with a white female. And we've got a specific fish that we're trying to produce. It's called. Kika Sweet, which is a metallic white and red fish. So we're going to mix a metallic white female scaleless with this fish and try to produce that and see with his high genetics, if we can produce his nice pattern on that fish and just kind of work on that. So we do try to work with genetics. And I know that maybe another trip to Japan might be in my future if we want to really get serious about producing a lot higher quality fish and get some more Japanese offspring. But you would be surprised at auction. I've seen fish go at auction jumbo, like 28 to 30 inch fish, even with the right people in the room, only go for $500 to $600.
Jimmy: That's incredible. I have one quick question. I come from the end of the wholesale end of it, and did you find it tough to get on the Japanese farms? I mean, I've watched 1000 YouTube videos and I watched the people cull koi fish, and I've watched all these videos, but it seems like the guys kind of say it's hard to get on these farms unless you know somebody. Have you found that?
Greg: No, absolutely not. When we went there, we went with a broker as a USA coy, mark bodycott is his name, and give a shout out to him. And he's a great broker and we went with him and he took us around all these farms. Any farm that you wanted to go to, anybody that really goes to Japan to look at fish, they're not your average hobbyist. They're going to know what they're doing. And when we went to one of those farms, they just handed me the net. They went in to drink some tea and they're, like most people that go there, are very experienced koikeeper and are looking for high dollar koi and know what they're doing. Just catch your own fish and let them know when you're done and then go through the routine. But no, we had no problem going. We were with a millionaire also within our group, so that might have helped a little bit, but we were able to go to any coy farm that we wanted to, really. And it's a very nice experience, I would say, if a person is serious into koi to go do that once in their lifetime, just to see how a farmer that raises them full time. And they typically will focus on one variety, and they'll have a trademark maybe in their variety as to what they're going to produce. It's really nice to see. And Japanese culture. I've been all over the world when I was in the military, I've seen France and Germany, and I really appreciated Japanese culture quite a bit. It was very respectful. You felt very safe. It was a very interesting culture to see firsthand.
Jimmy: And what was the cost of bringing those fish back home?
Robbz: Because I know a lot of people always in 2004.
Greg: In 2004, if you bought a $60 fish, it was going to be another $60 to bring that back home. That's nice because the fish gets shipped first. The fish will get shipped from Japan and it's almost 48 hours to get the fish from when they pack them up on their farm in Negatta all the way to the airport. And then to get them to the States. So they'll ship them to the States, might be 48 hours trip. And then your broker will usually hold those fish and your broker will take a commission off of those sales. So that's factored into the prices. But then he will quarantine those fish and make sure they're healthy. And then once they've had a six to eight weeks or longer to acclimate, then he will ship them to you. So that's kind of how the process works. And they ship all their fish. I don't know how they keep it all straight. That's probably another we could go through my Japanese stuff on the website and that's probably a whole another podcast. But everybody that goes there to buy fish from the dealer just writes down, oh, this is where this fish is going. And they don't ship out your fish that day. They ship out their fish all in one big batch. They just box them all up and then they go and ship them off. And that's how they come into the broker. And they always usually do that in the fall. The buying season is in the fall in Japan. And then they might ship them like in January or something.
Jimmy: So if that fish is sitting at the broker and god forbid something happens to that fish, are you still responsible for paying for that fish or is that something the broker absorbs?
Greg: Spring Clear yeah, that'll just be reimbursed to you. You don't pay for the fish actually until you get them shipped to you from the broker. So we picked out some fish in Japan and they had a seven point something earthquake the day after we left, two days after we left. And two of the fish that I picked out, one was in a soggy it was the blue fish and another one was a kujaku, which has a metallic pattern, was a very popular fish at the time. Those didn't make it. And a lot of dealers lost power and earthquake cut off roads and they couldn't get to their ponds and their farms. And so they lost a lot of fish. But those two fish I didn't have to pay for. But no, you only pay for what you get. So I thought that the Japanese buying experience, I would highly recommend it. You're going to see some very top quality fish there and definitely the culture and having tea with the farmers and eating fruit. In one instance we went to a farm and we got to watch them pull their breeders breeding stock and sit and eat curry at their house. Take off your shoes and sit on the floor. And it was just a wonderful experience. I would definitely recommend it.
Robbz: Well, again, Greg, thanks for everything coming on the podcast. Last thing that I have is I think you have an open house once a year, is that correct to the public?
Greg: Yes, that's right. Our open houses, we've tried it on Mother's Day weekend, and some people want to shop, some people don't. We've tried it on Labor Day weekend, and so now we just pick the weekend in between. It'll always be the weekend between Mother's Day and Labor Day.
Jimmy: Perfect.
Robbz: Well, certainly give a call and shout out Bickle.com. That's B-I-C-K-A-L numbers on the website. You can order fish directly from the website directly to your home. There's a whole shipping information. There's a library of DIY and help articles. Greg, thanks for your time, and do you have anything else for our viewers?
Greg: That's all I got to say, guys. Thank you and enjoy.
Robbz: Awesome. Again, thanks so much. And give us a call. Our numbers in the bottom of our website, aquariumguyspodcast.com. And be sure to go out, find your favorite podcast provider, whether it's spotify, stitcher, itunes, and hit that subscribe button to make sure to send notifications to your phone. When these come out, we try to do them once a week. Sometimes we'll do two a week. You never know. We're going to send them out to you. Make sure to like and subscribe and share this with a friend. Share this out to your fish community. And darn it, we're going to get Jimmy into Twitter.
Jimmy: Oh, I can't wait for Twitter. Hey, Greg, a special thanks again for sharing all your knowledge, your enthusiasm for being a hobbyist and businessman. I really appreciate it. I found this so fascinating. I want you back, man.
Greg: Thank you.
Jimmy: If we can bend your arm, maybe we'll do another future podcast with you. I know it's been fascinating for me, and I know Rob is just sitting here. He's taking notes down as fast as he can write them.
Greg: Thanks, guys.
Robbz: Maybe we can go on a limb and see if we can do one at your farm. When it's convenient for you, sir. We'll see, right. Do details in the future, grab some pictures.
Greg: All right, sounds good.
Robbz: All right, podcast out. See you next time.