A note from Noel:

Like my grandfather before me, I am a full-time commercial farmer. But instead of growing black angus cattle and wheat like he did in Reading, Kansas, I grow corals. I have been growing and producing corals for more than 17 years now.

Let me be honest about the reasons why I am building this website.

One reason is purely selfish. It will save me a TON of time answering emails and phone calls about the best way to keep corals in aquariums. I wish I had more time to answer all the inquiries, but, like most Americans, I am pressed for time constantly.

And its not just emails and phone calls. Every time I meet someone in public and tell them my job, I find myself explaining the same concepts of coral keeping over and over again.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE talking about growing corals. But I no longer have enough time (and energy!) to do so any more. So now I can just point them to this website and say "look it up on our website!"

So it just makes sense to take all of this knowledge and experience that I have accumulated over all of these years, and present it to you, completely FREE of charge, so that you can grow corals successfully. Sure it might help us sell a few more corals for the company I work for. And sure we might recoup some costs to maintain this website, from the ads on the site. But more importantly, it will help YOU buy and maintain corals more successfully. And that will almost certainly result in saving the lives of many corals in the process. Its widely believed that 90 % of all the corals bought today will be dead within 5 years. Thats terrible and disrespectful of mother nature.. We need to reverse that trend now.

The first question I usually get when people find out that I am a full time coral farmer is "Isn't it really hard to keep corals?" And what I always tell them is "Its actually quite simple to keep corals, as long as you do a "FEW THINGS RIGHT"

But if you are a newbie, how do you know what those "FEW THINGS RIGHT" are without making the mistakes us veterans have made? Learn from my mistakes people. I've probably made more than anyone else, but I have learned from them. In the pages that follow, you can learn the right way, and the wrong way to have a beautiful reef aquarium, based up my experience. And its all free!

Hopefully because Im not pushing any particular products to sell, just the concepts, then you will consider me to be an unbiased, more accurate source of information. And my experience should help too.

As the name implies, this website is geared towards getting beginners started off the right way. Its written in plain English. For greater details, you can either buy a book listed on our books link below (nope we dont get a cut), or visit one of the excellent forums such as ReefCentral.com. And by the way, your comments are welcome. If you've got a better way to grow corals, by all means let me know and we can add it. But these are the ways that work well for us, every day. We have over 300 types of corals that we are growing and more than 40,000 (yes 40 thousand!) individual corals growing as I write this in January of 2008.

How can we improve this website? What question and answers would you like included in it?

We welcome your comments, positive or negative. You can email me here.