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Netolicky was probably the first fish farming consultant, over four hundred years ahead of his time. His successor was Jakub Krcin, another hydraulic engineer famous for his ambitious schemes of creating new waterways and constructing large ponds, many of which were over three hundred hectares in area and more than ten meters deep. It was during this period that the early techniques for intensified fish culture began to appear in published books. In 1547, Ioannes (or Janus) Dubravius, the bishop of Olmutz and a contemporary of Netolicky, produced his Latin treatise, Jani Dubravil de piscinis et piscium qui in illis aluntur libri quinquae.

The golden years of marine fishing were about to become the dark ages of the freshwater fisheries. During the exact period when the coastal fisheries were taking advantage of the Industrial Revolution to expand at unprecedented speed, providing people with fresh nutritious seafood, the same revolution was rapidly decimating the traditional estuarine and river fisheries that had served the Old World dependably for so long. The traditional inland fisheries of the countries of Europe and the North Atlantic rim were based on migratory species, predominantly the Atlantic salmon and to a lesser extent, the eel.

The original charter of the Kladruby Monastery in Bohemia, for example, which is dated 1115, described a fish production pond for carp in great detail. Later, in 1854, one Baron Mongaudry was hunting in the archives of the French Abbey of R´eome, now Moutiers-Saint-Jean, in Bourgogne. There he discovered the old diaries of a monk called Dom Pinchon, who had experimented in 1420 with a hatching box in streams for the incubation of fertilized eggs of trout that he had been collecting. The Catholic Church kept its finger in the pie of most of the financial enterprises of the Middle Ages to share in the revenue.