Inside America’s Largest Koi Farm： How Fish Become Living Art ｜ PARAGRAPHIC

It's always important to keep the head of the fish down so it doesn't shake in the bag. There's over a couple million dollars a koi on the farm. Some of the most expensive fish are in the low six figures, two, three hundred thousand dollars for one single koi. You can see there's some classic koi there. Everyone thinks of koi as the tancho, the red dot on its head and the white body represents the Japanese flag. Koi bring a sense of peace and serenity and some cultures say good luck. What it really translates to is like living jewels and living art. If you're good at taking care of your fish you can win a koi show, you just can't win it overnight. Some of the fish here on the farm are only 15 centimeters, then we have some that are over a hundred centimeters. Most people just think there's one koi fish but there's hundreds of different varieties. I think they're very beautiful and they're desirable on their own and then you put them together and it really completes a beautiful collection. So this is our first greenhouse we built on the farm. We call this the quarantine greenhouse. It has 18 different koi tanks. When all the koi come from Japan, they get quarantined before they go out into customers ponds. Come inside and I'll show you what a koi quarantine facility looks like. My name is Brian Fitzsimmons. I run a company where we build, service, maintain koi ponds and sell koi fish. So koi are basically carp. They're carp from Japan that have been bred for generations after generations. They have beautiful colors and patterns and now they're known as koi fish. All right so in the quarantine greenhouse here we have everything separated by different tanks. Today is Friday on the farm and on Friday, Saturdays and Sundays we actually feed the fish. We don't feed them other days during the week because we're always shipping and if you feed fish before they get shipped they produce waste in the bag and they don't arrive in great condition. As you go through this greenhouse I'll be tossing some fish food in all the tanks. Each tank has different varieties of koi. Some might be a kahaku, a sanke, a showa and certain breeders specialize in those types of varieties. The simplest way to like picture that is the koi farmers are kind of like wineries. The more specialized that koi farm is usually the higher price and higher value it is. So you have a koi farm that might be producing a really really high quality in a small batch and then you might have a koi farm that produces more of a vast variety of koi and a lot of them and all that stuff reflects the price. My specialty is just selling them. We're not breeders here on the farm. We import the fish from Japan and then we re-wholesale them. I do have a couple favorites and those are the ones that sell the fastest. For me it's super easy to see which koi is better between A and B but if you took a side-by-side photo or fish A and fish B and looked at them and I pointed out a few things and key aspects of what makes a fish more desirable by the second set of pictures untrained hobbyists or beginner can identify oh this koi is better because of this or this koi is better because the pattern is balanced or the body shape is uniform. Having these few tips help hobbyists along the way and beginners appreciate the husbandry and the work that it takes to create a fish like this. You can see there's some classic koi there. Everyone thinks of koi as the tancho, the red dot on its head and the white body represents of the Japanese flag. Pretty cool to see we have a few in this tank but right there that's called a tancho and this one would be called a kahaku, a red and white. This was the first variety of koi ever produced and then later they produced this tancho which is bred from breeding kahaku and then they breed it down till they get that perfect red circle on its head and these fish are only one years old. The younger you buy a fish the more chance it has to have imperfections as it grows. The reason why a larger fish gets to be so much money is because it's gotten to a size with less imperfections. A small scale a little bit of red outside of like a circle or the cleanness of how the red meets the white all affects the koi's value over time. If you think about it as like living art right the more perfect this art piece is as it's three feet 100 centimeters the more value it's going to demand and being that these are all living pieces of art it sometimes to get a fish that big takes six seven years so the small percentage of a fish from one years old to that size and quality is so small. The breeders know that and they demand a price for that. It's a world market where the Japanese are selling so as the hobby gets stronger in all the markets the price of the koi gets higher. Just two weeks ago at one auction a fish sold for almost 50 million yen and that translates to about $350,000 for a one-year-old fish about 50 centimeters. I think that just talks true to the Japanese culture and how they do things with whiskey with beef sushi everything is small batches super high quality and it's the same with koi. Just like there's a dog show there's a koi show. People actually bring their koi all over Japan and the U.S. and other markets where they show them to win prizes judged by koi judges. To win a koi show or to have a really high-end fish you can just go buy one right there's fish for sale that are two three hundred thousand dollars you can go to the a breeder or a dealer and say hey I want to win a koi show and get that fish. A lot of hobbyists appreciate buying fish at the one-year-old age and then growing them themselves and being to say that hey I bought this fish I picked it out I bought 10 and I grew this one to 90 cm and it won a koi show and to me that's really impressive to see and people come here and spend an hour two hours picking through this quality of fish to say hey you know what I used my eye I picked the fish that won and it's also great to see when you go to a koi show and somebody won a fish or won a show with a fish that they bought for a few hundred dollars and grew it for 10 years in their backyard pond. So there's multiple ends to the hobby we sell fish in our stores for 30 to 40 dollars that are this big and they still have nice patterns they're still great you can put them in a backyard pond most people start on this on the lower end of the hobby and you can still have great fish you can grow a small fish that you buy for a few hundred dollars into a champion level koi. Here's some of the smallest fish we have on the farm so some of these are only about 10-12 centimeters they're a great size for a small fish tank or just beginners in the pond and these guys are awful hungry today. A big part of our business with Japanese koi is getting a fish all the way from the mountains of Niigata to Tokyo airport then to New York then to our farm. When you're shipping air cargo the most expensive thing is weight and that's how they base all their pricing on air cargo. Shipping koi gets very expensive very fast if you ever broke down an airline ticket it actually costs more per kilo to ship koi than it does a person. The reason we buy small koi sometimes is we'll grow them here on our farm and we can fit 150 koi this big in a box versus when you ship a two-year-old's koi you can only fit 10 to 12. That cost for shipping has to be broken down to each fish and sometimes a box costs over $600 to get from Japan to America. In Indonesia and Bali particularly and Japan koi are good luck and koi are really lucky. Some people believe in that here there's myths and legends with everything but I've kept koi as a business for almost 20 years now and it's brought me a good deal of luck so I'd say they're fairly lucky. This was the second one that was built here we call this one Champion House. It has two really large koi tanks. This one we keep a lot of our most expensive fish in. Come with me in here and we'll look at some bigger koi. So I just walked into this greenhouse we got Mike and AJ in here and they're boiling up these two koi for our customer. These are two-year-old fish they're called golden corns they actually get like a corn-like pattern as they get older and this is how we sell fish to customers when we're in Japan and on the farm. We just put them in a bowl like this take a quick video on our our phone and then we can send it to any customer all over the U.S. So the customer just picked this darker one here so we're just gonna bag it up real quick. What we'll do here is just put a little bit of water in the bag with the fish. So now we're gonna put half fresh water and then we have the palm water from here and we're gonna put it in the two bags so it's double bags. It's really important when we're shipping the koi to make sure the water goes above their gills. So a fish like this would be one per box or two per box coming from Japan and now we have pure oxygen so we always use two bags for shipments sometimes if the fish is really expensive we'll use three bags or four a thinner bag if it's being shipped like air cargo we just want to make sure that the fish gets there safe. Today this fish's journey is only three hours so we got oxygen and water it's good for about 40 hours in this box but the faster you get it there the less stress that'll have on the fish. Without air koi can't live like we need oxygen to breathe they need it as well in the ponds we have the aerators the bubbles coming off the bottom of the pond and then also all of our returns splash in so if one part of that fails the other part will allow the koi to be happy and healthy. In between here there's actually eight inches of concrete and then we have two inches of styrofoam on either side so with no heat or anything just having the cover these ponds maintain like 55 60 degrees in the winter so it's pretty energy efficient. This greenhouse we keep fish that are two years and older this pond specifically has two three and four year old koi some maybe five but you have a look in here there's just massive fish some are almost three feet long a meter this pond here is about 20,000 gallons and this greenhouse actually consists of 80,000 gallons of water this is fish mike we were very creative on that name as well his name is mike he works in the fish department and here is meter long yamabuki yamabuki is a style fish is a yellow koi it's called yamabuki ogon ogon means it's a solid colored fish as you can see you know all the scaling is perfect and to get it at that size this is why a fish like this will demand a higher price really good quality fish many times growing a fish to that side a yellow fish will get black dots on it or a scale will get damaged but having a fish that's perfectly yellow and all the scales are done right you know these are living things in the pond so they can easily get damaged or have a blemish based on water chemistry changing even having like a red and white fish you want the red and white to be very defined if the red bleeds and runs into the white that makes the fish less desirable or if the red and white fish has a few black dots on it that becomes less desirable it's not that it's a bad fish the fish doesn't know what its color looks like but it's nice to have a fish that just looks really good and is a great example of that variety of koi so we will grow some but most of the time we're buying a finished product and we actually go to japan a few times a year all these fish were picked out by me or my staff while we've been in japan so as you see mike's catching the fish right you know if you've ever caught a fish with a net before it's uh not the easiest thing to do when you're catching koi it's very important to be patient and allow the fish to swim to you and then you just kind of guide it you're not really catching it takes a long time to get experience at catching large fish if you chase them it stresses them out and it stresses all the fish out in the tank so mike just caught a tancho kahaku this fish is three years old it's about 70 centimeters we looked at these in the other greenhouse but to get a fish to this size where the head is still perfect there's no uh they call them shimis in japan little black dots or secondary red on the fish that's what people dream of getting when they buy a smaller fish a fish like this would sell between eight and fifteen thousand dollars as you see it's pretty perfect in the sense of that perfect round circle on its head the white is white there's no extra red really nice fish and look great in anyone's pond all right so we just caught an asagi here it's a blue fish with an orange stomach really interesting scaling pattern on a fish like this one of my favorite fish actually it's very rare to see a blue fish in a pond the cool thing about the asagi is you can get them in different styles you can have a little bit of orange you can have a lot of orange you can have the head with the orange i like when customers want to collect all the variety of the fish because there's hundreds sometimes people just want to pick a few to collect and start with this is a really nice example of an asagi in japan the fish are only indoors for about six months they spend the other six months outside in mud ponds you're living in your dream oh mike caught another fish all the fish we looked at so far had scales this fish is deutz which has no scales uh this actually has one lateral line of scales on it but you can see even on the camera how smooth the fish looks compared to the other fish this would be a deutz kiko koryu really cool metallic fish most people are getting into the more unique varieties this koi you know it stands out compared to your standard red and white fish and this fish to give you an idea this net is 36 inches this fish is probably about 32 inches it's still a fairly large fish these filters are specifically designed for koi ponds and wastewater treatment aquaculture when we have really large high stock ponds we'll use more of an aquaculture filter which is based for like higher fish loads more feeding and they're biomechanical so mechanical physically removes the solid waste from the water and the bio helps reduce ammonia nitrates nitrates in the pond also the mechanical part keeps the water nice and clean and clear because you can't really sell a fish in a dirty pond this is a showa really nice fish as well red black and white and it's pretty deceiving but these ponds are eight feet deep you see a fish way down on the bottom you don't think how big it is but once you pull it up you realize the size so the large tank there is 20,000 gallons and then the rest of these ponds are all 10,000 gallons this here is one of our newest greenhouses it's built out of wood just i wanted to build it really fast we got a lot of fish coming in as we've grown in doing this i realize that having simplification is better so every tank here is identical the same amount of size so we're treating fish or treating the water it's a lot easier to make sure all the treatments are the same so each tank here is 5,000 gallons each one of these tanks has 2,000 tosai in it these fish range from 6 to 12 inches these are one of our best selling items here on the farm it's a great size for any big beginner pond so we sell a ton of these we recently brought in 8,000 of this specific variety from one dealer and that was just a random guess at how many we're going to sell so i hope we sell them all here's a larger variety of fish these are all two years old pretty unique ones as people get more and more into collecting they're looking for those unique pieces to add to your pond it's it's like living art so the art isn't made up of just one it's the mix of koi that you have in your pond another thing we have is a butterfly koi and they're in this tank here all the fish we've seen so far are standard fin they have a short fin these actually have a longer fin and very creatively the japanese call them butterfly koi they're a nice flowing fin we sell quite a bit of these as well these are one year old koi here and it's just a nice addition to the pond the pure koi hobbyists don't really like the butterfly koi but i think they're really nice looking as well and it's a nice different kind of look a lot of times people come with an agenda of i'm gonna buy one or two and they leave with 10. one of the i guess misconceptions about koi is everyone thinks they're really difficult to take care of they're fairly easy to take care of it's just taking care of the water and managing that and the fish are really hardy you know they can stay outside i've seen them in ponds that haven't had filtration on for years that fish adapt and they do well and with a little bit of effort and the right filtration you can have really beautiful koi and it brings you outside from your house and like that daily thing and people just go out by their ponds and it brings them joy it's different than having like a dog or a cat because it brings you outside into the garden and it's a really nice addition of a water feature to be able to interact with and people end up naming the fish and get really attached to them as well some of them actually use the backwash water from the filters to water their garden their vegetables this water has so much nutrients in it because of the fish waste that it's really good for a tomato plant whatever you're going to water or grow you can run like a small aquaponic system off of this as well which i've seen people do which is really cool it's actually pretty funny like say we do a cleaning on a pond where it's actually we go to a customer's house we would drain their tank like this power wash and clean it and you go back two weeks later and you see the grass in like early march have this giant green stripe down it and everything else is so pretty dormant all because of all the nutrients in this water that's let the grass grow it's like going outside into your garden if you're having that aquatic space a waterfall the sound of water the aquatic plants and i don't think it always starts with fish it might say i was at a hotel in hawaii and i saw these fish and they raced over to me and i fed them and i loved it or hey when i was a kid there was a park and i used to feed the fish there so i think the koi ponds and the koi come so many different ways to people and i think everyone has like their own story and how they get into the koi pond some of our most like addicted passionate customers bought a house with a koi pond and never even wanted one and they turn out to like love it we've had customers that want a goldfish at a fair and then they wanted a home for it and they went to lowes and bought a tub for three four hundred dollars and next you know they're putting a thirty thousand dollar pond in their backyard we also sell uh japanese goldfish they're called tamasaba they're like the size of a baseball actually a little bit bigger so we don't normally sell them but this year we brought some in so i'll pull some up for you these can be kept in a fish tank or a small backyard pond these are also cold hardy they're fairly large so have a look at some of these that's a goldfish that's three years old you believe that people like having these in their ponds and mix up the variety a little bit not every day you see a goldfish that big these goldfish are also shown at goldfish shows throughout the u.s and japan you know these goldfish aren't going to get bigger than you know six eight inches it's just a different aspect of the hobby for me i can't get my head around like a goldfish being worth a couple thousand dollars but for me i think back to like that's probably what most people think about koi it's like that same reaction i was like how could you pay a thousand dollars for a goldfish but i think the general public has the same notion when i'm like yeah we sold the koi for twenty thousand dollars they're probably like wow you're crazy the funny thing is now the koi is one of my favorite parts of the business to work in but unfortunately i have a big job as like ceo and cfo where i'd love to just be up here all day selling fish and working on the koi but unfortunately i have to run the entire company but i try to get up here as much as i can especially at night when no one's here so it's good to be up in the koi today so we're going to bring a fish up we'll do a microscope scrape on it if you have an iphone you can actually put it on the microscope and we can get footage of the koi so what we'll do is we'll usually flip the fish over and then we'll take a straight from like underneath the gills and so like this is what a good scrape looks like and then you check it out under a microscope so this is something that we do within the first week of when the fish get here just to make sure we're keeping the fish as healthy as possible scan the whole slide and then get a little bit closer to see if i can see anything that might be a little smaller and the uh the parasites like to hang out on like the outer edge of the slime everything looks clean on this slide we'll do weekly scrapes just to make sure that the health of the fish here at the farm is like top tier we want everything to be good we want the fish to be able to go out whenever constantly doing scrapes and maintaining the tanks you know keeping the water really really nice for the fish so that's kind of like the most important part of it so this is a moving bed it's got biological filtration in it but when they eat they give off ammonia in their waist the ammonia can damage their gills it can basically kill the fish what this biological does it converts the ammonia into nitrites which is also toxic to the fish and then it eventually converts it to nitrates which is much more harmless to the fish so you have to have the proper biological filtration to maintain the water for the fish so we have a drum filter it's a profi drum the water comes inside of this drum and then it percolates out much like a coffee filter all the fish crap uneaten food waste gets stuck inside the screen clean water comes through goes to the pump pump back to the palm the nice thing about these is they clean automatically so as the drum rotates the screen is spraying all the waste into a trough and it's going right out we have to measure ammonia we use an ammonia alert cards where you just pick it up and look at the color so just the color of this being yellow tells me this water's safe there's not high ammonia if it starts getting blue toxic for the fish so we'd have to address it with a binder water change lower the fish stock but this card really works well quick test easy to do this greenhouse we actually call this lily house we name them for what they're supposed to be and then they change so originally the plan we built this was to have just tanks of lilies on both sides and then the fish department was like come on please can we just have five more tanks we need space so plants on one side and fish on the other originally all lilies that's how we have the clear thing on the top it's better for the plants but now it gets extra hot in here so we just deal with it and it's a good greenhouse where we actually grow some of the tow side to bigger because the water gets so warm but a lot of these plants now are dedicated to our construction and service teams that leave from the farm so these plants mostly are to fulfill like small store orders or for the construction and service teams to just use to put in the rocks on jobs or something just because it's easier than going to a different store if they're leaving from here it would have been nice to have it all plants but we sell a lot of koi here's some of the smaller guys i'll feed them in a pond they could these fish could get to like 10 12 inches in a single year as they get bigger they slow down growth but in the first couple years they grow really fast plants are in full bloom it looks like got some more butterfly koi in here the japanese think they're not like the pure koi so they're not as popular in japan there's actually only two farms that breed this style fish and they sell out every year so if i was a japanese breeder i would breed them but they don't you want to have about 800 to 1000 gallons minimum to start it's like a 10 by 5 like two two feet deep is a good size to start with just something you can keep a few fish in there the bigger the pond the easier it is to balance the the water parameters so this is up by night usually looks like i come in here i'll walk through the greenhouses i'll feed some fish unfortunately the size of the company now i'm walking around and i look for problems right my brain is trained to look for is the air on are the pumps on what's working i notice an aerator was off he used to just be plugged in or tripped or something yeah it's just not working it's all the way in i don't know why it was off but these are little things that if they're not working we could lose fish so every day it's so many little things that we have to check to make sure that the fish stay healthy so the property actually goes the entire tree line it's a little crazy but our main operation is done on like 10 acres here so this farm we purchased five years ago it was a poinsettia farm and i picked this place because it had a really good water source so we're on an aquifer here where we can pump so much water non-stop all day water is very important for fish especially fresh water it's on 100 acres here so it's plenty of room for growth for the company most people have no idea what we do so i put a giant koi fish on our mailbox out front that's like 12 feet long and this place is closed to the public and then once a year we do an event called koi fest where we invite anyone to come by we have a lot of non-koi hobbyists that come but we also get you know three to five thousand people from our local market and from all over the U.S. to come to this event it's a pretty rare to be a koi farm in New Jersey at this size this is what 2,500 koi boxes look like stacked up all these boxes were fully done shipped with koi from Japan to here to give you an idea we shipped the koi on an Airbus A350-1000 on JAL and that plane can hold about 750 boxes of koi we put about 200 per shipment it's a lot of space but it goes forever there's boxes everywhere as far as you can see and when they're fully done they're they're not small so you can imagine all these came with koi and it's our goal to then get these shipped out and sell so we'll know how good the season went depending on how many boxes are left hopefully none there's probably 2,000 boxes in here I've been pushing for growth I'm 33 now I've had the company for almost 20 years no one in this industry is doing what we're doing we're the only multiple chain retail pond store that services different states in the country we bring in the most fish out of anyone in the country I just want to keep growing and pushing and doing things that haven't been done before and growing a really nice hobby in the U.S. and making it accessible to all levels of hobbyists and I'm always pushing to be better and better at what we do and how we do things we'll see how big we can get it you know a lot of people this entrepreneur thing is like people think oh it's a cool thing now it's very hard work it's not built for everybody I'm lucky that I'm I'm decent at it it's not something that you can just say oh I want to be an entrepreneur it's late nights it's early mornings it's sleepless nights when you start it's hard and then when you grow it it's harder and then when you have a team of 90 people it's even harder so right now we're at the Fitzfish Ponds retail location in New Hope Pennsylvania this was our fourth retail store that we opened up about a year and a half ago this is a nice 15,000 gallon koi pond we built right in the center to mimic pond that's pretty famous in the store has everything you need for your koi pond water garden we're next to a walking mall called Peddler's Village which is pretty famous in the area here and that gets about three million visitors a year so having this pond for the people to feed we also have a pond inside their village about a 10 minute walk away with the fish feeding machine as well it just brings people into the hobby from a young age to start enjoying feeding the fish we're always seeing regular faces back here just feeding the fish enjoying the pond even though they might not have a pond this is one of my favorite stores i've been here through the whole construction process as we built it also it's really close to the farm and there's a lot of good restaurants in this village so it's a frequent spot for me when i want to get a bite to eat what's more eye-catching than a giant six-foot koi in front of the store so this is like our outside water garden area you saw all the koi fish at the farm here we have three different tanks for koi some really nice fish and they're hungry so many people just come to the store and once they get further into the hobby that's when they decide to make the journey to come to the farm and then come to japan you know if you're just after like a yellow koi we're always going to have something like that at each store but then if you want to really look at 20 different yellow koi that's where it makes sense to come to the farm all the fish look nice and healthy so i always like to come to the store and have nothing negative or no bad feedback to give when the boss stops by sometimes you know i have a list of things that need to get worked on so it's always nice when i come and there's not much to say besides good job some people say koi ponds are cheaper than therapy i've been around koi since i was like 12 13 years old it's pretty addictive and it's very relaxing to me just sit out by the waterfall like even now sitting here i hear the waterfall behind me and it's just a nice soothing sound and water is very relaxing to be around if you're not sure if you want a koi pond visit a place that has one feed the fish and see what you think about it