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 and thought 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. Mark went to look at it and it was perfect!
To cut a long story short, Mark set up the farm in 1990 only to discover that the
money his backer had promised hadn’t been available after all and so the bank had
provided the finance -
The ponds under construction
Mark and myself carrying out one of our first ever harvests in 1990
Sparsholt
