Now I am not an advocate of using crappie as forage in most cases, but think about what Dave is asking, what he is trying to achieve, and what his current situation is.
Most of you guys assumed he wanted to grow big crappies and were afraid of them overreproducing and stunting out at a small size. Dave is asking in my predator heavy situation would stocking crappies work as a forage to feed those fish? Also he doesnt need his game fish to reproduce successfully and their babies actually are just forage as well, slowing the baby gamefish growth down just a bit will actually work in his favor to provide meals for his predators.
As crazy as it sounds, I think in this exact situation he may be onto something. He needs a fish that will reproduce to provide something more for his walleye and bass to eat.
In a one acre pond I can't guarantee that this plan would work because crappies are not consistent in anything they do, but if you monitored the situation, and pulled out all the crappie bigger than 6 inches that you catch, I think you could pull this off and provide forage to your walleyes without spending money annually on baitfish stocking.
The reason I say to pull out the 6 inchers or bigger is that they are too big for your walleyes to eat once they get past 6 inches and then they become predators as well and are wasting resources.
If I were to do this experiment in your situation I would stock a couple dozen black crappies in the 8-12 inch range this spring and then I would work on catching them and getting them out over the next couple years and cross my fingers and hope they make a bunch of babies. Then just remove the surviving babies who make it bigger than 6 inches.
I have observed that walleyes eat crappies in a small pond setting.
