Lets talk fish food.
Let's just say We did not start out in the fish food business... it came to us.

When we were a small company, I contacted many commercial fish food manufacturers and requested small samples of their products to evaluate...
My thinking was good food + good conditions = good fish this, as it turns out, is one of the axioms of Koi keeping! In those early years the commercial food producers did not want to work with us with only a promise of future volume... It's very similar to the banking industry... if you NEED money they have a hard time giving it to you... If you don't need it... they'll beat down your door down to loan money to you.

During my search we did manage to convince 3 companies, that saw our potential, to give us a chance. We took basic formulas tweaked them, probably 10 times, doing trials and evaluating how our fish grew. We monitored how they looked after a month, how the water quality in the ponds and tanks were, how many "fines" were in the bottom of the bags, and other criteria, all based on the research done on aquatic foods. After all Carp are (or were) the number one produced food fish worldwide. And because of this, a lot of research has been done. We added, subtracted, tweaked, changed the original food recipies until we arrived at what seemed to work, for us and our farms unique circumstances. These recipies have evolved into what is now Blackwater Max, Color, and Gold diets.

We have been developing our Koi and Goldfish diets for years. All of our fish at BWC farms are raised on our own line of fish food. It is the life blood of our business and we have what we feel is the best variety of high grade Koi Food to grow your fish, to improve color and to keep your fish healthy and happy all year long.

We developed these diets to help improve our product, Koi, not to make a profit by selling fish food to others. After all... our Koi are our profits, the better we grow them, the more money we make. I never intended to be a Koi food company... after all, there are enough Koi diets on the market allready, right? There is one company that I feel produces a consistantly high grade of food... Hikari... their line of Koi food is good, some of it really good. My question, in the begining, was how do we, BWC, afford 800+ pounds of Hikari food a day??? You guessed it we couldn't and that was the engine that drove us to developed our own Koi diets.

Our food is produced one semi-truckload at a time... its fresh and has the ingredients the fish need, and want, (more on this later). At first our Koi Feed was strickly for our own "in-farm" use. we started getting feed back from our dealers who were buying our Koi about how good the fish looked! Many of our dealers

Here's all the above in a few short sentences... Do you want to feed your fish what's best for the fish... or what's best for yourselves???? We made a food that's 93% digestable (recent lab tests), economical and FRESH. We made it for ourselves and because of our volume buying power of the raw ingredients along with our special Mill prices... our brand of Koi Foods are available to everyone at a reasonable price.

Here's some basics about any Koi food - Good food smells like fresh fish... not a strong odor, a bit fishy... if it's strong smelling and has fish meal in it... then it's old fish meal.

We apply a fish oil to the food after it's extruded, the more you cook something... the less nutritious it becomes. By applying a nutrient packed fish oil after the cooking/extrusion process... we maximize the foods nutrient value. Yes some oil might be noticed on the surface of the water in your pond or tank after feeding, this is normal and will do no harm to your fish or your pond/tank. This little bit of oil, that you might see, is present because we saturate the pellets, as much as we can, (especially on the small pellet feeds as we need to grow the small fish quickly).

How many other food manufacturers' primary business is fish farming? How many use their own product? Not many. How often are their brand of foods made? Too keep costs down many manufactureres only mill once or twice a year in huge batches... So when you buy from these companies you really have no idea of when the actual Mill date was or how old the end product is!

Alright whats in our Max food???? The number one ingredient is... fish meal, fish meal, fish meal! 1st grade New England Menhaden meal.

Plant and Animal Protein Products;

predominantly soybean meal, it works well and many commercial Trout diets are converting to mostly soybean due to the skyrocketng cost of fish meal (up over 30% in the last year alone), you must have plant proteins in a diet as well. Without this carp (Koi) can develop some bad diseases. Animal protein products - we use feather meal... it's used in small precentages in our diets. It is digestable and adds the right amount of protien to our diets.

Here's a list of other ingredients;

Dried yeast culture

fish oil

vitamin A supplement, vitamin D supplement, riboflavin supplement, niacin supplement, calcium pantothenate, vitamin B12 supplement, choline chloride, d-biotine, thiamine mononitrate, pyridoxine hydrochloride, vitamin E supplement, menadione sodium bisulfite complex (source of vitamin K activity), folic acid, zinc sulfate, copper sulfate, manganous sulfate, potassium iodate, ethylenediamine dihydroiodide, ascorbic acid (source of vitamin C)

Vitamins and Minerals

Color Diet - Some notes on this feed... If you don't like the oilyness of our small Max diet then you might try this food as it is not nearly as oily. A lot of people have said, "I don't like to feed color food continuously because my whites will turn yellow". Over the years I have found that the feeding our Color Diet continuosly, in a Koi pond, had no major effects of yellowing fish... If you want cherry red results... get a diet that's super high in spirulina... it will turn them red fast... and then yellow if you do not stop at the right time. We made a diet like that and fed it to our fish to produce "import red" color on a brood a few years ago...

Cool season Diet Blackwater Cool Season food is blended to be easily digested during the seasons when water temperatures stay below 60°F (16°C). During this time of year your fishes metabolism slows and digestion is more difficult. The Cool Season diet contains a complete mix of ingredients for the cooler times of the year. Feed this diet prior to breeding season to reduce fat deposits and the possibility of "egg-bound" females.

Wheat Germ	Fish Meal	Plant Protein Products
Dried Yeast Culture	Shrimp Meal	Wheat Flour
Garlic	Rice Germ	Vitamins and Minerals

Our newest diet; Blackwater Gold Professional - We feed our broodstock and our best ponds gold diet... It's formulated to be highly digestable as well as grow the fish quickly. One of the main ingredients that makes it stand out is. Bascilus Subtillis... a live diegestive enzyme that helps break down nutrients in the fishes digestive tract... You will see this concept being advertized in yogurts at a premium. Bacillus subtilis remains one of the most potent and beneficial of all health-promoting and immune-stimulating bacteria. The Gold Diet contains a list of premium ingredients. Its great stuff. Fish Meal, Plant Protein Products, Animal Protein Products, Dried Yeast Culture, Fish Oil, Dried of Vitamin C)

So is Joe full of CRAP about the gold diet?... well sort of... if you've got time to read... here's an interesting story... about eating crap to you're health... with a smile.

Bacillus subtilis remains one of the most potent and beneficial of all health-promoting and immune-stimulating bacteria. According to clinical studies documented in the medical research report: IMMUNOSTIMULATION BY BACILLUS SUBTILIS PREPARATIONS, by microbiologist J. Harmann;

Here's the story about eating crap...
Dr. Rothschild backed up his point by telling us the story of the discovery of the Bacillus subtilis, a bacterial microorganism that is commonly found in the environment rather than in humans, yet is well known by modern science to be very friendly to the human system. It can promote dramatic healing benefits in humans, even though it isn't one of the native microbes that normally inhabit the human body. According to Dr. Rothschild, the story of Bacillus subtilis is:

The bacillus subtilis was discovered by the Nazi German medical corps in 1941, toward the end of their African campaign. At the time, the German military power was at its height. But the German high command became genuinely alarmed when hundreds upon hundreds of soldiers in North Africa Front suddenly began dying each week. Oddly, the Nazi soldiers weren't dying because of any British retaliatory bombs or shrapnel, but instead, they were dying of uncontrollable dysentery.

Of course, the Germans were aware that dysentery was caused by pathogenic (i.e. disease-causing) bacteria from local food and water sources. But in those days, there were no antibiotics. Sulfur was already on the market, but only in a topical non-ingestible form. So with no medication available with which to stop the plague of dysentery, the Nazis quickly began looking for other means to help their dying soldiers.

The German high command immediately sent out a contingent of scientists, physicians, chemists, biochemists, bacteriologists and other experts to help solve the problem. With typical German circumspection, these top experts reasoned that there must be a natural way to counteract the deadly bacteria causing the dysentery because, if there wasn't, the millions of Arabs living in the region would have been dead long ago.

Therefore, the Germans' first step was to closely scrutinize the native Arabs, and see whether or not they were affected by dysentery.What they discovered was that the Arabs also caught dysentery, but at the first sign of diarrhea (the #1 symptom of dysentery) the Arabs would do something quite incredible: They would immediately begin following around a horse or camel until it would drop its dung. Then, the affected Arab would pick up the warm dung droppings, and quickly gulp them down! This strange procedure effectively eliminated the dysentery almost overnight.

Once the good hygienic Germans finally recovered from the shock of seeing the Arab natives gulping down warm camel dung, they quickly realized that there must be something in the dung that somehow counteracted the harmful bacteria that caused the dysentery. They questioned the Arabs, who told them that they had no idea why it worked, but that their fathers had always done so, as had their forefathers, and it had always worked. The only caveat was that the camel or horse dung had to be ingested while still warm and fresh, because it had no effect on the dysentery if ingested cold.

So the Nazis began carefully examining fresh camel and horse dung. What they discovered was that it was teeming with a powerful bacterial microorganism which later came to be called Bacillus subtilis. This bacteria, it turned out, is so strong that it practically cannibalizes all harmful microorganisms in the human body, particularly pathogenic bacteria like the virulent strain which was causing dysentery in the German troops.

Within a very short time, the Nazis began producing hundreds and thousands of gallons of active Bacillus subtilis cultures for their troops to ingest. And bingo, no more dysentery! Soon afterwards, the Germans even discovered the process by which the Bacillus subtilis cultures could be dried and placed into easily ingestible capsules. From that time forward, the resourceful Germans had no more problems with dysentery.

Still Benefiting Health-Savvy Individuals - For many years afterwards, cultures of Bacillus subtilis were sold worldwide as a medicinal product (sold in the U.S. and Mexico, for example, under the brand name Bacti-Subtil) rapidly becoming the world's leading treatment for dysentery and other intestinal problems. Unfortunately for Americans, this popular bacterial supplement that cures intestinal infections began losing favor in the late 1950's and 1960's, upon the advent of synthetic antibiotics which were heavily touted by the giant pharmaceutical companies as "wonder drugs," even though they cost five times as much as Bacti-Subtil, and took three times longer to accomplish the same results.

Nonetheless, Bacillus subtilis remains one of the most potent and beneficial of all health-promoting and immune-stimulating bacteria. The cell wall components of ingested Bacillus Subtilis are able to activate nearly all systems of the human immune defense, including the activation of at least three specific antibodies (IgM, IgG and IgA secretion) which are highly effective against many of the harmful viruses, fungi and bacterial pathogens which regularly attempt to invade and infect the human system.

Bacillus subtilis is still used widely today in Germany, France and Israel, where safe, effective all-natural therapeutic products are more highly esteemed by the health-savvy public than the more expensive synthetic drugs espoused by the orthodox medical establishment with all of their dangerous side effects.

In short, the incredible Bacillus subtilis, which is commonly found in the outside environment rather than in the human intestinal system, continues to benefit mankind ever since its unusual discovery by the Germans in 1941. What's more, it is only one small example of the multitude of "friendly" microorganisms which can create tremendous benefits for humans when ingested, even though they are not necessarily "native" microorganisms to the human body.

pretty cool huh?.... I don't suggest eating warm Camel or Horse dung though!

Joe Pawlak