Coral Farming at home: How to start?

[Wrassenaround]

I would say start with a 29 g or 40g breeder when petco has a $ per gallon sale or if u want something larger look on cl or fb marketplace for a larger one locally.

Buy job filter that's 3 to 5x turnover (tankvolume)
Buy filterfloss chemipure blue and carbon to put in it along with extra cartridges

Buy 2 to 3 150w heater 20 to 55$
And maybe a back up

Buy 55g drums or garbage cans
Have two one for fresh rodi one for saltwater and have a few buckets
Buy 2 small wavemakers 15 to 300$ depending on brand sun suns from China are cheap or u can overspec if money isnt an issue
But rember we want this to be a profitable/ cost effective endavour

Buy a 2ft 4 bulb t5ho or 165w chinese phlizon viparspectra or will led off amazon for 89$

A smaller tank without hardware will test u and make u a stronger fish keeper as you will learn propper maitence regime and get in the rhythm without hardware rember you take care of the coral not the hardware a machine cant do the job of a human sometime or they can but lack in certain aspects

Next is to buy a rodi unit that is 5 stage
This is close to 160$ but will save money and errors in the long haul as long as u keep up on filters every couple of months

Make 2 vats water

Make sure water test 0 ppm


Add powerheads and heater to one

Mix salt into one

Buy refractometer instant ocean salt and kh cal mag test kits

Buy all for reef powder or esv bionic 2 part for first 2 part as they are cheap and pretty much dummy safe


Buy quickstart or biospira to cycle tank

Mix ur first vat of salt at 1.025

Set up tank 29 or 40g sumpless for first tank add heater

Add bacteria wait a week add ammonium then turn on hob filter
Then add light

Wait a couple of days add wavemaker

When nitrogen cycle is over test tank to ensure 0 ammonia

Then add fish

Wait until tan reaches stasis then add coral

Test dkh cal mag daily and nitrates phosphate weekly, icp test once a year or every 6 months if you have many systems

I can attest to starting small and having success along with gaining an understanding of what a good maintenance regimen can do for a system. I started with a 20 gallon long and an HOB (hang on the back) filter. I kept my start up costs low and slowly upgraded equipment as I advanced in the hobby. Fast forward almost 2 years I have a thriving mixed reef with very little death (knock on wood)
If you start with a small tank and don't keep up with maintenance....you will NOT succeed.
Doing your research and not making spontaneous livestock or equipment purchases will make your introduction to the hobby a lot easier. A good saying to live by with this hobby is "nothing good can happen overnight but a lot of bad can" Good results will come with time but a lack of patience or research will lead to bad things quickly.

 

[CaseyWagner]

People keep recommending the "Dollar a gallon" from PetCo but that never applies to those of us who live outside the US.

In Canada a 40 gallon breeder cost me $200.
I imagine your cost in Australia will be about the same or higher.

 

[3429810]

That was an auto correct issue from industrial I haven’t spotted

That makes much more sense

 

[Stigigemla]

First question: What kind of person are You. Did You buy and sell things at school? In that case You might be the right person to run a business like this.

Second question: You live in Australia where the environmental laws are hard and cared fore. Have You checked up what kind of corals You can have a permit for growing. What do You have to do with your used water? I guess that You cant dump a lot of saltwater in Your drain because it will ruin the bacteria in the water cleaning.

Third question: Have You checked up Your market - Do You have customers that will buy Your corals.
How does the cites function in Australia? I guess You have to have a certificate to be allowed to use the cites forms
That will follow each stone coral. How do You get this and how much does it cost?

 

[ChuckTownReefer]

I use hydroponic reservoirs they come in multiple different sizes and are about 13" high and they are cheap.

 

[polyppal]

With no experience in saltwater and reef keeping you're going to have a hard time just keeping corals alive in the beginning let alone thriving to the point of being able to frag them especially in a new system.

My advice would be to just start with a tank you like and give corals a shot after you learn how to hold your water parameters steady. Once you get a few fish and can keep your nitrates phosphates and salinity within range soft corals are always a great place to start. theyre the easiest to care for, grow, and can be quite easy to frag when the time comes. If they do well and your alkalinity, calcium and magnesium have been staying in range you can move onto lps like hammers, bubbles, chalices etc. Once you add them or even sps youll eventually have to start dosing for alk, cal, and mg to keep those parameters stable. And lastly when you feel ready acropora and some of the touchier sps should be your last additions.

Only after you have a thriving reef with atleast 1-2 years under your belt would i recommend looking into a frag tank or growout system. You can no doubt make money off growing corals but you need a decent amount of volume and be able to grow them efficiently with minimal loses, along with proper quarantine processes to make sure your corals are clean and pest free. I make a few hundred bucks a month off fragging my main display, but it always goes right back into the tank as new corals or maintenance/supplies.

+1 ^

Reefkeeping isn’t basic fish stuff, learn how to crawl before you walk…

Even then, aside from the few large-scale big names, your unlikely to make any substantial profit in this hobby. I’ve been in this hobby for 20 years, prob spent tens of thousands of dollars and maybe recouped a few thousand. Realistically, most hobbies aren’t something we do to make profit, but rather something we spend our cash on because we enjoy it and find if entertaining/relaxing or even distracting from the stresses of day to day life. Maybe view the hobby in that light to evaluate if it’s right for you. GL!

 

[longtimereefer]

Hi. Recently I've wondered about growing/farming coral but I have no idea of what I would need. I have never owned a saltwater tank before but was planning on getting one anyway as a display tank and thought that growing coral could be fun and profitable (could be wrong, but thats why I'm here). So I was just wondering what I would need to create a hopefully successful coral farm.

Coral farming is highly relative to where you are located when it comes to profitability etc. Where I am located, the closest LFS is 3+ hours away to my east, and west there is nothing until you get into Colorado etc (5+hrs). Almost everything is via shipping. Look at your area, what type of reefers are there, if most are newer and don't have tons of experience... Grow easy to keep fast growing corals... Water stability and healthy parameters are paramount. Highly recommend you just take your time and have fun realizing it will take years to get true experience. Watch lots of videos from good sources, start small, grow out good mother colonies started with frags from great mother colonies (WWC etc), make small frags, ensure there aren't nasty pests on them, hit some swaps with your stuff, or trade with locals, sell a few. It can pay off very well if you are in the right spot selling the right goods. Just realize most reefers don't stay in the hobby long, but if you play it right, be very patient, let nature take its course...

 

[Acroguy]

1st - Start with a display tank, enjoy it learn how everything works do not rush things.It will take time till you figure everything out.If you are able to grow out corals in your display then you are on the right path.First try to sell frags out of your display tank ( cut to order frags ).If this works then you can plan to go bigger.Buying more tanks to put your frags in.But this will take probably years of time and a lot of trial and error.So grow your business slowly.Read a lot ,learn and get experience.Going too big too fast will be counterproductive.

 

[BradB]

OP is in Australia - everything will be completely different.

I've never tried to set up a coral farm as a profitable business, but I have sold a lot of frags. My biggest struggle is predicting what will be "in fashion" a year ahead. For example, Space Invader Pectinia and bounce mushrooms have been very profitable for people, but I never sold any. Green toadstools, superman montipora, surf-and-turf acropora all commanded very high prices at one point and did well in my tank but buying $100 frags you sell for $5 a year later is not profitable. Actually making money means predicting trends, which is something I am terrible at.

Depending on where you are located, shipping, frag swaps and LFS are places to sell corals and all have somewhat different needs. Shipping is an art in itself, and you need a successful website and a variety of products to support one - you cannot just set up clovepolyps.com and hope people buy if you just have tons of clove polyps and nothing else. LFS might not want what you are selling, and if they do, they likely will pay you pennies on the dollar relative to what you get selling other places, but it is a good way to unload large amounts of coral quickly. Frag swaps are probably the best way to go if they are in your area, although this is a lot of work. You can easily make a job out of the work selling corals and not so much the work growing them.

Right now, I'd advise people looking to start this to grow Acropora, high end Montiporas, Blasto's and Acans. Although as I said earlier, my ability to predict trends is not good. You want things that grow in a reasonable amount of time - Acanthophyllia, Cynarina, etc all command high prices because no one figured out how to grow them profitably so they come from the ocean. I've rarely thrown away Acropora because I can't sell it, but it is really hard to make money selling Xenia no matter what you do.

 

[Zoa_Fanatic]

You’re not going to make a ton of money doing this unless you shell out a ton of money. I grow just enough to pay for my supplies and to trade for other frags as I want them. Best case scenario is growing enough to pay for your supplies and any new frags you want until you can get some really expensive corals. Then you can start turning a small profit off your frags. In my area there is no one hardly who sells on the cheap end. Makes it a little easier. If I were to move an hour away though the market is saturated with local reefers and I likely wouldn’t be able to make any money.


Edit; didn’t see you were in Australia. My understanding is the lack of coral shops there you’d be able to make a decent living off this if you could get some of the rarer pieces going

 

[LuizW13]

Crawl, walk, skip, jog, run, keep running..farm coral

 

[cryptodendrum]

If you're doing this on the basis of some of the YouTube videos that range from calling Coral Farming the new Bitcoin (really, just absurd and click-baity) to farming of the future for revenue stream creation, you can best stop right there.

This is a hobby that already has very high churn rate due to several factors, the almost supernatural level of patience required, scientific understanding and knowledge of chemistry and marine biology, abnormally high demands of time and personal effort, and financial investment. Further, there is a lot of risks as well - and psychologically humans are really not great at understanding their own risk exposures and/or not willing to take the effort to mitigate those risk exposures, until they have experienced risk realisation and consequences which in this hobby = personal losses of livestock & financial investments.

Further, there are a lot of people in the hobby who will insist on giving you bad / poor risk advice in regards to disease, parasites, etc. not because they are bad people or are trying to be evil, but they've made questionably poor risk decisions & haven't experienced the risk realisations yet and will go on for years attributing their success in spite of taking proper risk management decisions as a form of Confirmation Biases. Again and again, I have seen over 30 years now, people spouting off things like "I've never quarantined anything for 5-10 years and everything's fine" and then BOOM....they add that one coral or one fish - and 24-48 hours, everything in their tank is dying or already dead. This has even happened to some popular YouTube persona's in the hobby.

As someone who spent some time working as a ranch hand in central Texas in my youth, NO-ONE becomes a successful rancher / farmer from scratch simply because they bought a farm or ranch & some books on the subject. The same is true with Coral Farming. True success is the result of running a farm or ranch for more than a decade & overcoming all the unexpected obstacles and risk realisations those books and online forums (or neighbour ranchers) never told you about. And while in some countries, it's possible as a rancher to insure your live stock against extreme weather or other risks, in the coral hobby - you can probably forget about that as a mitigation strategy. Lose your coral live stock with a street retail value of 10K dollars because your tank developed a silicon leak at 1am at night? The insurance company *might* buy you a new floor, but in regards to live stock, you're completely on your own.

Just put off the dreams of being a Coral Farmer for a minimum of 5 years (10 is better) and focus simply on trying to operating a sustainable and growing reef - this is already more difficult than a lot of people think it is and a big reason that is more difficult, is a lot of people don't want to do the level of work it requires. For instance, a lot of people in this hobby find strict Quarantining already too difficult and challenging or costly. And while you can just accept the risks of skipping QTing your new fish and corals & accept you'll just choose to "manage Ich" rather than focusing on eradicating Ich, if you decide to focus on "managing ich" - than Farming for profit is probably not the right choice for you. Because there are plenty of people like myself who can and do all the work required to offer guarantee's as a Value Added Service / Product of Disease and Parasite free coral and fish to wholesalers and retailers, who turn around and pass on that Value Added product to their customers. And once a retailer realizes they don't have to face near as many angry / upset customers because they are only supplying locally breed & raised corals and fish that are 100% disease / parasite free, they don't like going back to more questionable sources of livestock which could negatively impact their thin profit margins.

And if you're curious about my background - I started in 1991 with Coral Reefing. It wasn't until 2007 that I literally started farming for $$$ for a local wholeseller - but it still took me 4 years to convince them to start buying from me. The reason they are hesitant initially is because they already have reliable sources, and a new local novice breeder, who more than likely cannot guarantee a steady reliable supply of livestock like they are used too from current suppliers. So this too will take some time to build these relationships and connections before you even start pushing corals and fish out the door to commercial businesses.

It's not impossible to do what you want, but the bar you will have to meet is probably much higher than you expect. So best to give yourself time to prove to yourself you can do it sustainably for at least a few years at first, then move on to commercial activities & plan how you will scale up in the future to meet the demand, as well as figuring out how to scale up your own market demand for what you're wanting to sell.

Good luck.