North Wales Koi Club Forum

Since Colin stopped supplying the Richdon Koi wheatgerm to the club members I have used various other brands over the past year with differing results.
Initially I used Kusuri Premium who supply Richdon but with another price hike to £46.00 per 5kgs I looked around for alternatives.
One disappointing brand I tried was NT Labs Medikoi wheatgerm with garlic.
The garlic is supposed to suffuse through the koi's skin and cause waterborne pests like Costia to swim away from fish yet I had my worst outbreak of Costia despite feeding the food to my koi for three months prior to outbreak!
Biggest problem though was the high amounts of waste produced from fish by it, a large percentage of the food seemed to pass through fish relatively unchanged, clearly visible on pond floor so for the high cost of food at £42.48 in my opinion not good value for money.
What is value is the floating wheatgerm koi food from Merseyaquaticsltd a Liverpool firm I found on eBay, at £22.29 inc P&P its food my koi like and there is little waste from it.
I have tried other brands with varying degrees of success over year, one was Queni Koi wheatgerm, it was ok but overall not as good as the Merseyaquatics food.
I will assess it over this winter and appraise in the spring.

I look forward to hearing the results of your food testing. It's very difficult for the hobbyist koi keeper to test one food against another. The only way really is to have several identical tanks of koi and to monitor their growth. EA did when they first introduced their koi food.

But what does the hobbyist do when selecting a new food to try, for me the following process usually takes place.

1. Read or hear some favourable reviews about a certain food. This can be fraught with danger as very often a Dealer introducing a new food has some of his regular customers feed a kilo of his new food and then come out with glowing praise.
2. Look at the protein content of the food, after all you don't want to be feeding 45% protein food in the winter.
3. Look at the price, usually in the belief that the more expensive food will have the best ingredients. Well this used to be the case, but the number of dealers re-bagging bulk manufactured food such as Coppens and passing it off as their own new super food at treble the price is quite alarming.

Once I've got the new food what do I look for when I start feeding?

1. Does it cloud the water? A definite no no if it does, although I think most food is now pretty good in this respect.
2. How readily do the koi take to the new food? This is not a good indication of the how good the food is. As any carp fisherman will tell you, there a myriad of attractants on sale to add to their carp bait to make it more attractive to their prey.
3. How much waste is there? I've found that generally the more expensive foods tend to have a lot less waste than some of the cheap pellets. But then if you are comparing a food costing £1.50 per kg against another costing £10 per kg you'd expect some trade off.
4. Is there any improvement in the koi? This is the hard one, as you've nothing really to compare the results to. You can only really go by what you see before you after feeding for a few months.

Colin

Main manufacturers are Skrettings Norway, Coppens, Holland,Crosfields UK, plus several smaller specialist manufacturers.I have emailed most of them for more information and at present am waiting for replies.
Skrettings are by far the largest in the world but Greenpeace and others have issues at present with their sourcing of Peruvian anchovies for fish meal,
See "Greed of feed" Utube, this video was made in 2008 so a lot has happened since, but not enough it would seem.

The latest figures for 2010 from the Skretting web site give 81% of the fish oil they used came from Anchovy and 78.8% of fish meal also came from Anchovy, with Peru being by far the largest source, so I guess not much has changed.

To be fair to Skretting though, they are continually researching ways to reduce the fish meal and fish oil content in their fish foods. Although I suspect the ever rising price of fish meal is the main driving force behind this.

E-mailed Skrettings twice and no reply to date will try again in new year but won't hold my breath!
will post food/pellet findings when weather improves April-ish.