so I have a 1.5 acre pond in Northwest Missouri that is unknown how old it is. It has about a foot thick carpet of what I believe is filamentous algae and chara. The pond edge all around the entire pond is about 2 foot deep out to 15-18 feet from the shore, from there it drops sharply to 9-10 foot deep throughout the rest of the pond. When you walk out in the pond you really sink down because of the silt, which I am guessing is 2 foot deep or so along the perimeter. My hope was to get someone with an excavator out here and dig out the perimeter and leave the middle alone. But I have no experience in this and don’t know where to start. The silt can be piled up and i have a loader that I can use to carry it to a nearby field or below the pond damn. Is this a workable venture, or is it better to just drain and redo the pond? I know my next comment will garner several it all depends, but Any idea on the ballpark costs for either venture? Like, am I talking several thousands, or 10s of thousands?

So here is the overview of the pond. The north end is clearly more silted in. I added measurements for size sake. One thought I had was to pile some of the muck up on the north end at the little offshoot area. I am going to look into pond renovation companies up near Kansas City, but google hasn’t come up with much

It is about 80 yards wide by 120 yards long

Welcome Bac from a fellow Missourian!

I have seen track hoe excavators clean out ponds from the bank without draining the pond, ussually for cattle ponds. I find this to be an improvement, but it does not "Go All the Way". I tend to be an overdoer when it comes to hobby projects (where permissible). The amount of silt that can be removed is limited to the size of track hoe that you can acquire. It would be best to have the track hoe drop the silt away from the bank so that it is mostly spread out so that it can dry over the course of the next few seasons. This way it is not a wet mucky mess when it comes time to relocate and spread out. The wet silt is like herding cats until it dries and piled up silt will not dry easily or quickly (read years not seasons).

I believe your best bet is to break the dam and drain the pond before spring rains come, let it sit until late summer so that it can dry up some and then get a track loader (or similar equipment)into the pond to "get it all out". This is where pond experts come in handy. Too many broken dams do not seal back up afterwards and a little pond dam knowledge can save you a failed pond.

I am not expert on the topic, this is just my two cents. If you get any good advice from my post...remember to spread the silt as it is removed from the pond (a foot or so thick). I had a small pond de-silted last year (2016)and a lot of the muck was piled over the dam. It was still too mucky to work with a skid steer/toothed bucket at just 1 foot beneath the surface 8 months later. We had to do a few hours of work and then wait a few weeks to hit it again, then repeat. Always risking getting the skid steer stuck or sunk.

PS: My 1/4 acre pond had the dam cut big enough to drive the loader through,8 foot(deep)of muck removed, A new 15" diameter by 60 foot long plastic drain pipe installed and the cut refilled/compacted. All said and done about $4000. Which equaled about 30 hours at $100 per hour plus the pipe costs and some skid steer clean up and grading.

You are in luck.

You're in the hometown of Shawn Banks and Midwest Lake Management. They'll know how to help you.

http://midwestlake.com/

Thanks both of you. Bocomo, are you the same Bocomo from Archerytalk that made paracord slings? I bought some for my brother and I years back, and they are still in use and as awesome as when we bought them from you. I appreciate the info and resource. Im not from Polo originally, so I had no clue that company was right in my back yard. I was hoping if I drained it myself, I could skip that expense and not have to breach the damn. Im going to hire the work out, and not try it on my own. But before making calls, I wasn’t sure if I was looking at $6k-$10k, or $15k and up. I tried the muck measuring test as I saw on a search on here, and 5 feet from shore it is 2 foot of muck as measured in several places, i did not check out deeper... a little too cold here today

Haha, no, I'm not handy enough to make something like that!

We have an old 2.2 ac pond with a similar amount of muck as yours. Our dirt guy estimated $15-20k for the redo. We thought that number was reasonable.

The real problem is, we don't have anywhere to put the spoil. 2.2 ac times 2 ft avg muck is about 4 acre-feet! We have outbuildings below the dam so we can't just push it behind there and leave it.

Resolving the problem at hand is one thing, preventing (haha more like slowing down) it happening again is another. What does the watershed look like above the pond? I see you have two feeder creeks/inlets that likely provide a great deal of sediment load entering your pond. After you remove the sediment from the pond you should address the amount of sediment coming downstream and entering your pond.

Several years ago my FIL lowered a 3 acre pond via siphon, then had a large track hoe come in and reach what he could from the bank (not the dam). Stacked the silt in a "windrow" along the bank. Probably only spent $1000. A good track hoe operator can toss a lot of silt at $120 per hour.

After drying out a year or so the he used his own dozer to spread the silt out. The pond has row crop in the drainage so silt is an issue. A new 1.5 acre pond has been built above it so it takes some of the load.

You are right, i already had that thought as it is real sandy silt coming in from the creeks. I planned on building a silt catch pond for that purpose. Here is a wider pic of the area. There are 5 feeder creeks that converge before my pond. The whole area surround is old farmland that has been in CRP since 2010. Most just came out of CRP so I assume my neighbors will start farming again.

Red, that was what I would hope to do. I do have a 3 acre area that I can designate a muck drying area.

When that CRP land goes back into row crops expect an increase in nutrient load from fertilizers as well as silt. Maybe a wetlands area would help? Experts?

wetlands, weirs and a sediment pond defiantly can't hurt