Welcome to a walk round our fish farm and introduction to the staff. Customers are often interested in the whole operation here at New Forest Koi. This site gives us an opportunity to walk you round our farm to see a little bit more about how we operate. Unfortunately we do not allow members of the public onto the site, but would like this chance to take you through the site from breeding through to sales in our shop and mail order. Our farm is registered with CEFAS, who carry out annual checks by visiting the farm to discuss any issues we may have.

Shaun Clark
Shaun is the owner and manager of the business along with his wife Jackie, who runs Forest Aquatics, and together have built the business to its current position, developing an efficient mail order service and retail shop, with a large customer base across Scotland, Wales and England.





Richard Carpenter
Has been with the business for many years, helping to achieve their current level of success in the market. Qualified in Fishery Studies and Fish Farming, with a wide range of practical experience including farming in Israel. Rick also runs his own farm, UK Koi, selling fish to the trade.


Carl Wrighton
The most recent addition to the team at New Forest Koi, Carl has arrived with us with a broad range of experience and qualifications in fish farming and Science. Aside from a degree in Aquaculture and Fisheries Management, Carl has worked with many species of fish both in the UK and abroad, including Trout, Carp, Halibut, Shellfish, most Cyprinid species out in Germany, and the development of Aquaculture in the Amazon region of Brazil. Carl also takes on the technical roles within the company, operating our website and email communications.

The Farm

Broodstock

Click here to see our brood fish!

Our broodstock are the most important comodity on the farm, having been gathered over a number of years from some of the best breeders in Japan, and from our own bloodlines. They are kept in two seperate systems, an outdoor and an indoor one. Keeping the broodfish totally seperate from the rest of the farm ensures no disease transmission either way, protecting both the farmed fish and the precious broodfish. The two seperate systems allows us to have total control of the condition of the fish, extending our window for breeding to potentially the whole year round. Indoor facilities provide an area where new Japanese broodstock can be held, fish that that have not yet acclimatized to our climate and conditions. Here we can keep a close eye on them and alter their environment accordingly should any problems occur.

Breeding Tunnel

This tunnel allows us to control the temperature to ensure our selected broodfish are ripe for spawning at a period of time we select. Fish are constantly monitored and the moment they are ready to spawn, are removed, anaethetised and stripped. Again this tunnel allows us to keep brood fish seperate from all other systems, and is disinfected after each batch of spawning. Dry stripping both the eggs and the milt gives us total control over the breeding, to match exact parents, and to further prevent cross infection from the parent fish to the hatchery. This process maximises hatching rates and fry survival.
Cages are placed around the ponds during spawning ensure that fish cannot jump out of the pond, a common occurence in heated, oxygenated water, especially when the fish are in a spawning mood.

Hatchery

Stripped eggs are laid out onto specially designed mats to be put out into the ponds in our hatchery. This tunnel keeps the water temperatures up and provides a secure place to hatch out the eggs. First feeding of the fry occurs here with brine shrimp, hatched on site. The image on the right shows some of the hatched fry at 2-3 week old in a hatchery pond.
Ponds in the hatchery have removable covers, used to protect the ponds from overheating in the summer, and to cut down on blanket weed growth. The filters on the ponds help to keep the water quality stable, as the ponds contain lots of organic matter from the breakdown of the eggs as they hatch.

'B' ponds

These ponds are used for the fry as they come out of the hatchery. They are prepared to ensure lots of daphnia are present, to provide a supply of live food whilst the fish are weaned onto dry diets, a commercial fry feed fed through automatic feeders (see image left). Fish will be graded from these ponds a number of times throughout the season to split them to suitable areas as desired. Harvesting is done throughout the season by netting, and at the end of the season by draining the pond down. These are 11 of these ponds on the farm, and are covered by netting to deter predators such as Kingfishers and Herons.

Holding ponds

There are a variety of areas on the farm with holding ponds of various sizes and designs. This gives us the flexibility of keeping different batches of all species growing on throughout the warmer months.

Earth ponds

There are a number of Earth ponds on site, again varying in size and depth to give us a great flexibility in growing and holding a range of fish varieties. These ponds are generally fed by hand or automatic feeder. In addition to this, the vast amount of live food and space available to fish ensures fast growth, with superb condition and colour.
All of the Earth ponds are clay lined, which is the nature of the soil in the location of our farm, making ideal conditions for growing koi. All of these ponds are drainable for total harvest, and throughout the season are seine-netted for selection of fish to place in our shop or send out through our mail-order business.

Growing on Buildings

In recent seasons, we have been developing a number of indoor units, insulated and heated to further increase our flexibility with regard to how we can keep fish. These units enable us to grow on select fish throughout the winter, resulting in a much healthier, faster growing stock of fish. In the coming seasons this will enable us to provide younger fish much bigger than has previously been possible, enabling us to keep our prices down to a minimum, and quality to a maximum. These specially designed and built ponds are warmed using a boiler system, and the building is heavily insulated. These buildings also ensure the stock are protected from predators. Fish are cooled gradually before sale, to avoid any temperature shock and its associated problems facing our customers.
We are finding stock easier to manage using these units. Fish coming in from mud ponds may have large pH changes to overcome, plus the stress levels of moving to smaller units with a greater water clarity means it takes much longer to settle the fish before sale. Fish from the growing on buildings settle instantly in our shop/customers ponds and are practically hand tame from a very young age.

Retail Shop

2005 has seen New Forest Koi move into new premises for its retail business. The new shop, situated next to our fish farm, just down the road from the old site, utilises the buildings of an old pig farm, over 100 years old. Though the farm has long been unused, we are able to give these listed buildings a new lease of life, dispalying our Koi and pond plants. Increased holding space with 8 large vats and 14 small ones, and improved designs allow us to offer more to our customers, in much improved surroundings.

Mail Order

Our mail order service has gone from strength to strength, with more and more customers across the country joining our growing list of regular clients. All across England, Scotland and Wales people are now enjoying fish from New Forest Koi. With the new addition of our debit/credit card service, this process is now even easier!