About The Farm
This is our story from the beginning:
My name is Lisa Davis, I am Director, administrator, secretary, farm hand and mother to our two sons. My husband (Mark Davis) and I run Cuttlebrook Koi Farm right here in Oxfordshire, UK. 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

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Mark with Mr Kamihata | Mark preparing for spawning at Yamazaki |
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Photo right - from left to right: Himeji high grade breeder (name not known), Tanaka San (General Manager for all Mr Kamihata’s farms) - known to the other employees as “the culling machine”!, Nushimura (Yamazaki Farm Manager) and Kesuge Yamaguchi, Mark’s colleague and best mate at Yamazaki. | The son of the well known nishikigoi breeder Isa, who came to study culling at Yamazaki at the same time as Mark. |
When Mark came back from Japan he got a job at BritKoi working for Eric Devis and then from there went to work for the Kent Koi Company. Mark ran their koi farm but also got involved in pond construction and was involved in some very large projects. It was here that he learned all the basic techniques of building a good koi pond and the skills involved from pipework to filtration and fibreglassing. It was also during this time that Mark did the benching at the BKKS National Show three years running. Mark and I first met during this period - it was 1988 and I was working in IT sales at the time.
The Farm
About a year later, Mark decided that it was time he started his own koi farm and with a backer he set about looking for a suitable site. He looked all over the south of England and on his way back from looking at a site in Hertfordshire, he got lost and ended up heading into Thame in Oxfordshire. It was March and as he approached the town he could see the flooded water meadows - it looked an ideal area for a fish farm. He drove into Thame town centre, parked in the car park and the first building he came to happened to be the local land agent. He went in and told them what he was looking for and the agent said that just that morning a piece of land just like he had described had come onto the market in a village called Towersey, just outside of Thame. Mark went to look at it and it was perfect!
![]() The Diggers are in! |
![]() Dug Out! |
The ponds under construction |
![]() Mark and myself carrying out one of our first ever harvests in 1990 |

New Beginnings
In 1998 Mark’s ex partner decided he wanted to sell the farm. We couldn’t afford to buy the whole 15 acre site and so bought the 6 acres that contained the main ponds. Now that we owned the site ourselves we decided that we would try and make it a business again. There was no accommodation on-site and, although we lived in the village by now, we realised, from experience, that there was no way we could successfully run the farm unless we lived there, so we applied for planning permission to live on site. We now had a six acre field with ponds on it and nothing else, we had no mains electricity, no mains water and no sewage. We had to first build ourselves a 150 metre driveway which had to be 1 metre thick to cope with the water logged nature of the land. Next we had to get mains electricity laid on which cost thousands of pounds, once we had done this we could then construct our living accommodation!
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Our temporary home in 2000 (not quite finished!) whilst we developed the farm. |
We also had to dig a well. Fortunately Mark had perfected the art of dowsing for water with metal rods and was able to find a suitable spot to dig a well for our household use. Now we had water we had to install a sewage treatment plant for the house. Finally, and only once we had done all this, we were able to move in which we did on the 11th December 2000, our youngest son was not quite four years old at the time. We now had to develop our farm. We were no longer able to use the original fish house so we had to construct new holding facilities, for koi fresh from the mud ponds, and also breeding facilities.

The start of the construction of our sales area and holding facility

After completion
In order that Mark could concentrate on the farm full time, I set up my own company doing business to business telemarketing for IT companies, working from our office at home, this supported us for the next couple of years. We started trading as Cuttlebrook Koi Farm in March 2001 and have had to make do with the facilities that we had, each year adding to and improving them. With no investor and a determination not to borrow money from the bank to finance the development of the business, the farm has had to pay for itself right from the start. In 2002 it was making enough money for me to stop running my telemarketing business and to concentrate full time on the farm. Early in 2005 we finally completed our spawning facilities and for the first time we were able to breed enough koi in one hit to fill all the nursery ponds in one go.
Koi Spawning
Our five spawning tanks By the end of 2006 we had completed three fully insulated and heated buildings - our Quarantine House where we quarantine new brood stock, our Tosai House where we grow our best tosai, or one year old fish, during their first winter, and our Nisai House where we take our Nisai or two year old fish, over the winter.

Quarantine House and Nisai House to the rear
The koi we breed from originate from well known Japanese breeders including Omosako, Matsue, Momotaro and a number of other notable breeders. All are chosen on the basis of their suitability as a parent fish and qualities such as body shape, skin quality etc are uppermost in their selection. We have steadily increased the production of our nursery ponds from harvests of just 5-20,000 fry at 1 inch over the years to now where we harvest between 20 - 50,000 fry per pond. The more koi you have to select through at 1 inch, the greater the chance of finding the high grade fish that would otherwise not have survived. We are now keeping less per harvest which means the quality of our koi rises even further.



Our aim has always been to breed Koi of the highest quality but our emphasis has to be on the health and welfare of our fish first and foremost. We don't buy fish in to grow on and sell and we don't send our fish off site to be grown on elsewhere, neither do we mix the fish that we sell with Koi from any other source. We have a bio-security plan approved by Cefas who inspect our farm twice a year for signs of infectious diseases such as KHV and SVC. Our site now consists of two polytunnels, one for Koi sales and the second, a dedicated breeding facility where our parent fish and spawning tanks are located, plus four insulated buildings. The first is a quarantine facility, where new Japanese parent fish are quarantined, the second is our Tosai House, where each year we overwinter the Koi that we have bred during that summer at around 23 degrees, and the third is our Nisai House, where we grow on Koi that we have bred into their second year. The fourth is a new building, which is an additional growing on facility for larger fish. We also have nine mud ponds which are designed as nursery ponds for growing on fry over the summer.
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Spawning tanks |
In 2008 we replaced our "shed" home with our permanent home which is where we live now.
Our home - 2017
In March 2017 we were contacted by the journalist Kevin Pilley who, having read our story, wanted to write an article about us. The article appeared in the Sunday Telegraph!
Who knows what will happen next on the farm but one thing that I have learned is that whatever it is, it won't be boring!