A sunny, 50 degree day in January is a perfect day to get a tour of the farm.

Here is Mat giving a tour of the farm to the Aquaculture Class from Rutgers University

After enjoying our holiday with our family, we were welcome back by a visitor to the farm.

Its sights like these that remind us of how lucky we are to work on a farm!

Mat just sent this picture from Newark Airport

Behind the scenes in Cargo..

We know its been a while since we blogged. I assure you that its not becuase we havent been here- Just the opposite! 

Things here on the farm have been very busy. Our limited staff has proven to be a bit challenging.  But,  Mat is on with new updates for the farm, as we are getting ready for many exciting events here at the farm in 2012.

Today is a rainy day in NJ and the job of the day is to ship a large shipment of koi to sunnier skies for the holidays.  Yes, these are BIG girls!

It has been a busy few weeks here on the farm since our Main Event Harvest. All the big girls have settled into the greenhouse and are breezing thru quarantine. More tosai have been brought in from the mud ponds. With a successful year in breeding, there has been an enormous number of koi for Mat to grade thru.

But! As promised, Mat is offering this winter his top Tosai Tategoi in his 6-8inch range. These koi will get the same 6 month growout as the koi in our Spring 555 Event, but they will be  grown out in our greenhouses over the winter, to be picked up in May.

Follow this link to the sale on our website http://www.qualitykoi.com/koicatalog/138-bett-2011

A Word on our Show Wins

from Joe Zuritsky, President of Quality Koi Co., Inc.

September 26, 2011

We thank our loyal customers for their faith in our farm and in the koi we produce there. But especially for buying and showing the two great koi that were picked as Grand Champions on Saturday, September 24 at the MAKC’s Koi America show in Maryland and the Rainbow River koi show in Florida.

This last weekend was the culmination of a dream we at Quality Koi Co. have had since starting the Nisei Koi Farm in 2001, which was winning Grand Championships in koi shows in the U.S. against imported Japanese koi with our own U.S.-produced koi.

 Our plan was to create a koi-production farm using high-quality imported Japanese parents that could produce real U.S.-bred tategoi for us to sell here. The skills and knowledge of Mat McCann, Jen, and myself amount to over 85 collective years of work and study of the art of keeping koi, and in the last decade, producing and selling high-quality koi on a commercial basis.

 To be honest, if I would have known in advance how difficult this business would be, I’d have never entered into it. But since I had already bought and sold koi as a hobbyist dealer and, in my backyard, successfully bred and raised hundreds of baby koi from a spawning, I clearly simplified the difficulty of the project. So, after recruiting Mat from England and Jen from the NJ Aquarium, we all rather naively took the plunge together.

 The first decade caused us to endure a long, painful and expensive learning curve that had us, at times, doubting we would ever achieve a profitable business. But, Mat, Jen and I persevered and finally the good genetics of our breeders and hard work have finally begun to pay off with our great number of impressive wins in the last four (4) koi shows.

To keep things in perspective, I have to keep reminding myself that it took over 200 years for the Japanese to develop their koi production to where it is today. So, even with our advantage of using their best breeding stock, ten years is not such an outrageous period for us to nearly catch up by beating some of their high-end koi here in the U.S. koi shows. Thank you all for your confidence in us and your patronage.

 Very truly,

 Joe Zuritsky

Thank you to everyone who contacted us with your concerns.    Everything here at Quality Koi great! We were prepared for the worst and luckly that was not what happened. The winds from Irene came thru much lower speeds then orginally projected and the greenhouses with stood the winds just find. Tornados hit north and south, but missed us. The only flooding that effected the farm was on East Quillytown Rd (rd leading into the farm) that kept Mat from getting to the farm after the storm passed late Sunday afternoon..but by early evening, that water had receded and Mat was able to check that everything was ok here. Although, Mat turned on the generator to run the farm Saturday afternoon so there would be no time with out power, it did not seem the farm lost electric.
Monday was spent unbattering down the farm by the staff members who weren’t pumping out their own basements.

Everyone is back today and farming is back to usual.

Hopefully this isn’t just a sign of the fall we have ahead of us…

Happy to see the generator being delivered!

and the diesel to run it..

The good news is Verizon has finally fixed our phones and we are now reachable by phone again! Bad news, we may have a storm coming towards us.

With all hopes Irene will decide not to visit NJ, but we are watching the weather reports very closely and right now its not looking so good.  So, with the greenhouses fully loaded with koi, we have no choice to stop our regular farming and start preparing for the big storm. Generators have been ordered and will be installed tomorrow.  Emergency air supplies are bring installed.  Koi are being spread out from their heavy loaded tanks. 

Its alot of work that hopefully won’t be need!

We are currenlty have phone line troubles here at the farm. We are trying to have them fixed as soon as possible, but  with Verizon on strike, it may take a bit longer then normal.

Please feel free to send an email if you need to get in contact with us until the phone lines are fixed – info@qualitykoi.com

Thank You