Hi, my name is Lisa Davis. I am Director, webmaster, bookkeeper, secretary, farm hand and mother (and taxi service!) to two boys aged 11 and 13. My husband and I run a koi farm in Oxfordshire called Cuttlebrook Koi Farm. We have never kept koi for a hobby but Mark has been breeding them for twenty years. When I met Mark in 1988 I didn’t know anything about koi but at the time he was writing three of the chapters for the Interpet Encyclopedia of Koi (history, breeding and feeding). A good way to impress a girl!
Sparsholt
I found out that Mark had been to Sparsholt College from 1983 to 1985 and studied fish farming – of course in those days you had to work for a year on a fish farm before they would even let you on the course. He has some great stories about his year spent living in a soggy caravan at the side of a loch in Scotland! At Sparsholt he studied water chemistry, geology, fish farm construction techniques, fish health and disease diagnosis amongst other things .
During his time at Sparsholt he worked on several fish farms in the UK and also on carp farms in France and Hungary. He had some amazing experiences during that time. It was here that he encountered his first koi amongst a lake full of table carp in France and it was then that he decided that he wanted to learn more about them.
Sparsholt
