Your 3 easy steps before owning your Koi Fish Farm        If you love Koi, and really want to love your work, why not start your own koi farm? I have had several farms. Here are the three easy steps in building your koi farm. Step one - Location:    But not just any place. Realtors say "Location, location, location" to emphasize the importance of where you are in what  you're doing. In koi farming, it's water. First, forget using what they send from the city. While the chlorine won't be a problem,  that's only because it will all evaporate by the time your first pond is half filled from the municipal mains. The real dilemma, and  it is common for many wells too, is flow. To supply literally millions of gallons to fill ponds, replace evaporation, and flush in  emergencies, one needs a considerably better than average well output. You can also opt for river or canal water, filtering it  through a "sock" (probably a size or two larger than yours) to remove disease-carrying trash organisms. Do remember to check upstream for pesticides, fertilizer runoff, and how your water rights stack up against others during a dry year.  Fortunately, since the current El Niño is expected to persist, drought should not be a problem in places like Texas. In fact, if the spring 1998 US Weather   Service predictions hold water (ahem) koi farmers near rivers might have plenty of water for their ponds. And basements. Ach, fish farmers have it so easy.      Water won't do you much good if you don't have clay soils to hold it. Good soils will not only hold water like a clay pot, but support huge quantities of   beneficial bacteria, nutritious insect larvae, and control algae growth naturally. For producing the finest koi, there is no surpassing an earthen pond with the   right clay. Bad soils, on other other hand, may hold water just fine but contain industrial wastes, mine tailings, or entirely natural but toxic minerals. A good  trick for finding the perfect property is to look for one that already had a successful fish farm—one that simply went belly up when the market bottomed out. There, you know the water and soil are good, and all you have to do is patch up the ponds and fill them. Don't worry overmuch about the same thing   happening to you... everybody knows lightening never strikes twice in the same place.

Step two - Find the Money:       You can eliminate banks for the larger loans immediately, particularly if you've already spent your entire savings, retirement, and second home mortgage.   If you haven't, you obviously aren't serious about a koi farm. An alternative approach is to find a corporation with deep pockets that will fund you in exchange for managing their bass fishing, but I don't recommend this as a long term solution. Third is to put on a suit and tie (if you have one) and visit venture capitalists for investment. Don't get your hopes up though... venture capital demands high returns and serving both your stockholders and the koi  community is probably impossible.       Here's a tip: Spare yourself some trouble: the best money comes from folks who have made their own fortunes already and trust you implicitly. For myself, one such person, is Billy Cooper. The real secret, is a different kind of   support: a loving wife who believes in her husband, and two little girls who understand why their father can't shower them with time and gifts. As much as anything, it was solid support from his family that helped me make this new start. Don't start a koi farm without it.

Step three - Throw Together a Farm:       Compared to steps one and two, this is a cake walk. It's amazing to me that more people don't start koi farms. Get a mess of money together, starting   with your life savings, retirement, second mortgage, etc. and make the high bid for the brood stock you've worked with for as long as five years. Don't forget the stock aged from a few months to four years so you can immediately start selling as well as spawning. Next, call in your buddies like Bob Johnson, flood the old catfish ponds, and turn your recently purchased fish loose (that particular grass carp is a former GLI kujaku loose in the recently flooded lawn). Finally, toss up a holding facility, plumb the commode for your visitors, and hit the show circuit to publicize the new farm. While you're doing all that, you'll also need to spawn fish so there's no gap in your offerings a few years down the line; and, of course, don't quit your day job. Nothing to it, see?      Starting a Koi farm is so easy that I did it from start to finish in less than a year. Still, it wasn't my  first Koi farm, or even my second fish farm.

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