Originally posted by Bruce Condello:
Cecil, don't you think that this might be an economical way to select for feed trained fish when it comes to smallmouth bass, largemouth bass etc? As expensive and hard to come by as they can be it seems like you could cheaply purchase a bunch of advanced fingerlings, then after a couple of months the fish that are growing are obviously the agressive and/or feed friendly fish. Then you could sell or give away the smaller ones which would probably be great fish for someone anyway?
Everybody else-Am I just dreaming, or would this not be a possibility to get purchased fish up to a size that they wouldn't get devoured the second they hit your pond? Even if you don't have well water, you could siphon waste once every couple of days. Just wondering... 
Bruce,
Absolutely. I think you also should be able to take it a step farther, and not even have to purchase fish of any size from a supplier. But what you are doing right now will give you valuable experience. You can work up to this as you gain experience.
I would eventually like to produce my own fish completely from eggs from my own broodstock as I'm sure you would. I belive you're already doing this with bluegills?
As far as yellow perch eggs they are easy to collect from a pond if you have broodstock in the pond, and there now is good information on how to hatch them etc.
I have had YP numerous egg strands in the pond edges that I could have collected. That said, one of the difficulties with the perch is once you hatch them indoors you must provide zooplankton ASAP, and even are able to provide zooplankton by feeding water in from the pond the fry are so small you run the risk of losing them in your tank overflow. (At least that is what a professor from U of W told us at a recent Aquaculture meeting. From what I have seen most producers hatch them indoors and then plant the fry back into a special pond. Once they get to be a certain size then they feed train them.
I already have good bluegill reprodution in my bluegill pond as you probably do, and it would be quite easy to trap enough in one or more minnow traps. I plan on doing that this spring. I want to put them into a tank and feed them and have water from the bluegill pond flow through via gravity or a ram pump. I guess I would need to bring them indoors in winter of which I do have a storage shed partially underground.
Sure would like to produce all my own fish and I think I can do it. Just wish I had more ponds!
I'm putting in a "floating raceway" into my new trout pond ajacent to a pier this spring. My well water flow will drop into this floating raceway and exit into the pond like it normally does. I should be able to easily regulate it as it comes out of a PVC pipe. If I want less flow I can put a gate valve on the end of pipe with a diversion pipe on the side. I hope to grow out trout fingerlings to planting size in the raceway and the next step will be to put in another well on another part of the property with a low flow and iron filter to hatch my own trout eggs. I dont' want to run the present one at 38 gpms all year just to hatch eggs and it's not needed for the main trout pond in winter anyway.
