it has been established the only stocking I’ve done the last two years was 100 pounds of GSH and 50 pounds of FHM per year. That has helped to keep the fish growing fast but want to find a way to eliminate some of the costs of stocking but still get the excellent growth rate. IMO it seems like I could cut the tails on 100 smaller bluegill per day and not dent the population if I keep throwing my breeders back. I feel like I could give them more forage than the 150 pounds per year that is costing me over 1,000 bucks per year in just stocking. My plan was to not harvest bluegill this year at all throw everything back over 7 inches and cut the tails off everything under 7 inches and return them for forage food.
Any other insight would be great!
That's a LOT of money for forage. I would be in real trouble at home if I spent that much of our funds on forage, feed, or anything pond related.
It's also very time consuming to catch, cripple, and hand feed small BG to LMB. Probably better to get feed trained LMB and buy feed.
There is more return on investment with prepared feed than there is providing forage fish, even if they are "free". Again, catching and preparing them takes a lot of time.
If your goal is large LMB, and you are prepared to do what it takes, either way should work.
