My client also has a family size of 5. He is aerating, but not feeding. He has more water acreage than you will have, and it was determined that without supplemental feeding his ponds would not produce enough fish per year to support two meals per week for the family. One a week was pushing it.
With the equipment that is available on todays market, I don't consider aeration and feeding maintenance. Aeration is a "install in the pond" once, then once in the Fall and once in the Spring, switch the diffusers from winter to summer. If the system is set up for minimum maintenance, that equates to turning a couple of ball valves off and a couple of them on. Once a year pick up the diffusers, scrub them off and drop them back down.
Feeding can be even less maintenance than feeding a dog or cat. Fill up the solar powered, automatic feeder once a month, make sure the timer is set correctly and forget about it. Clean it once a year. When the water temp is in the low 60's or upper 50's, turn the feeder off, clean it out. Start feeding again when the water warms up past that mark in the spring.
Here is a thread on carrying capacity of ponds. It relates very well to what you are trying to accomplish. I doubt that you could harvest 50% of the carrying capacity of the pond and still keep a self-sustaining population of harvestable fish.
http://forums.pondboss.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=201295&page=1 That's why I was asking about how the fish would be cooked. Filleted fish, depending on the skill and species of fish, will only have a marketable yeild (if you want to call it that) of 50%-70% of the gross weight of the fish. If the fish is marketed as bone-in, I'd bet the marketable yeild would be 60%-80% of the gross weight of the fish.
Somebody please check my math because it isn't my strongest subject.
You aren't supplementally feeding.
Predator fish convert prey fish to body mass at the rate of 10:1.
Take fillets for instance. Lets use the high side of the numbers. Say each person consumes 1/4# of fillets at each meal. 2 meals a week. That's 2.5# of fillets per week, or 3.6# of gross fish weight per week.
So, your pond would have to grow 36# of fish per week to support the 3.6# of fish that you take out for the table. That's 1,872 pounds of fish that would have to be grown in your pond from hatching as eggs to you taking them out as grown predators. That does not take into account how many fish have to be left in the pond to reproduce to keep a sustainable harvest.
How does that figure relate to the carrying capacity of a pond (per surface acre) that is not aerated nor supplementally fed (that was given in the link that I provided)?
