Koi Farms » Koi Breeding Process

We use a variety of methods to spawn koi in the spring.

Some are wild-spawned where the male koi and female koi are placed in the mud ponds and allowed to spawn on removable nests. Some nests will be moved to grow-out ponds and others will remain in the ponds with the parent fish.

Some are tank-spawned. Parent fish are injected with hormones to induce ovulation and then placed into fiberglass tanks lined with nests. If conditions are agreeable, the parent fish will spawn the following morning. Egg-laden nests are then moved to prepared koi hatchery ponds

Some are hand-stripped. Again, the parent koi are injected with hormones. The following morning, the fish are monitored for signs of ovulation.

When ovulation begins the females are sedated and the eggs are stripped into a stainless steel bowl. Soon afterwards, milt from the males are mixed with the eggs and fertilization begins.

Fertilized eggs are placed into hatching cones where they will remain until they hatch 4 to 5 days later.

Producing high quality koi is incredibly labor intensive.

Many hours a year are spent culling koi and butterfly koi. The first cull happens in mid- summer when the fish are 1 to 2 inches in length where the unmarketable fish are removed. In some varieties, as many as 99% of the population is culled out.

The "keepers" are then put into grow out ponds where they will continue to grow. As the fish grow in size, they're continually harvested and sorted and the best fish are grown to bigger sizes.

Koi are harvested using long nets called seines. In full ponds, the fish are lured into corners with food and the seine is pulled across the corner.

After a few pulls, koi quickly learn to avoid the net and the water has to be removed to catch them.

Fish are placed into sealed plastic bags containing water, ice and pure oxygen. Packing densities are designed to keep the fish alive for at least 24 hours.

We ship commercial airfreight to your nearest airport from Greensboro, Raleigh and Charlotte five days a week in the summer, insuring that over ninety percent of our shipments will arrive at their destination within twelve hours of being packed.

We can also have the fish delivered to your door via next day UPS.