Attached are pictures of a 30+ acre project my brother and I are working on.
Originally, this was a flooded peat strip mine 3-5 feet deep. Friends with excavators installed two Agri Drain units (12" inlet, 18" drain) and created about 5 peninsulas with adjacent 12-15 ft deep holes for fish to survive our Illinois winters.
The only evidence of existing fish were two dead 3"-4" grass carp and a live bullhead sighting. There are numerous 10" turtles and thousands of large frogs, but I'm guessing the shallowness of the pond and winter kills kept any significant fish population from establishing itself. When the pond was drawn down for installation of the Agri Drains, there was no evidence of large carp.
A few weeks ago, 40lbs of fathead minnows were added and at present, we believe there are few if any predators for them to encounter. The plan is to attach some plastic jugs filled with dirt and Smart Weed (from my backyard pond) to the pallets and sink them in the deep holes. Hopefully, between the newly flooded weed beds and 14 pallet structures, they will be able to establish themselves, reproduce and survive the winters.
We'll soon introduce some channel catfish as predators to hopefully eat any small carp and keep them from becoming too established and sink some small garbage cans in the deep holes for the catfish as well.
I've been re-thinking the whole catfish-bluegill-bass stocking formula and am considering going with catfish-crappie-northern pike. From what I've read, the crappies are hearty, prolific breeders, grow large and are better suited in large bodies of water.
Stocking a pond of this size per the recommended quantities minnows-bluegill-bass would be expensive. I'm thinking if we go with crappie, they will have plenty of food and space to grow for a few years before any danger of stunting. At the end of year 2 or sometime in year 3 we can introduce northern pike as the master predator to possibly keep the crappie population in check.
In a few years we hope to end up with large catfish, large pike and large crappie. At the very least, we should see large catfish and large pike.
It appears most of the posters on this site are not big fans of crappie and pike, but I'm guessing that has more to do with trying to manage their population with bass in a smaller pond.
