Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Feeding Calculate annual amount of feed for 9 acres?

We are in the middle of construction of a new 9 acre pond on a property in Central California. Our winter temperature occasional get down to 28 degrees (no snow) for a month of so and summers there can be sustained high 90's and low 100's for late summer and coming into the fall. The fishery will be a bluegill & bass fishery. Pond is new with sculptured bottom and depths to 12'. It will be a "Bass Disneyland" with concrete rock piles with orange trees mixed, deep cut ridges and flats with shallows layde with plastic and covered in 6" of pea gravel and small islands with steep cuts to prevent tule growth spreading.

Aeration will be a Vertex system designed already by Vertex. It will consist of a Air4 XL5 unit with 4 air station producing a 1.39 daily water turn over rate. Water will be supplied from and only a new deep well (great water). We are in the process of creating a annual budget to plan for costs involved to have a highly successful fishery.

Stocking plan will be initial 1,000 copper nose bluegill (1" - 3") per acre and then wait a year to get a strong prey base. We plan on installing three (3) fish feeders to feed the bluegill (one feeder per 3 acres). After one year and sampling for abundant bluegill we plan on stocking 1 lb. feed trained Florida's at a ratio of 10 lbs. per acre - approx. 90 bass. One of the feeders will then be filled with bass chow pellets and the original two units will stay with bluegill sized feed. Does this sound good?

Additional forage will include tilapia at a ratio of 10 lbs. per acre with 3/4 tilapia stocked each Spring when the water temperatures reach 75 degrees. Also, thread fin shad will be stocked in late March at 68 degree water to establish if not try again until they do (readily available nearby in a canal).

So with this info I have provided I get to the question -

How many pounds of feed should I budget for on a monthly and annual basis for the first year on bluegill only. Then second and years to follow, pounds of bluegill and bass feed?

There must be some formula based on pond / lake size and size of the biomass?

Thanks guys!

Dave

David:

That will be hard to durn near impossible to give you an concrete fighre. There is so much that falls under the catagory of "it depends". It depends on how much the fish will eat, water temp, etc., etc. Feed only the amount of food that they will consume in 10-15 minutes. You can feed 1x or 2x per day. Stop feeding when water temp drops below 60 degrees. The fish will eat the best when the water temp is between the high 60's and the high 70's. They will slow down in warmer water.

What feeders do you plan on using? I don't know of any feeder on the market that will throw both smaller quantities of 1/8" to 1/4" sized food and also throw the largemouth feed.

Or you can do like I do. Since there are probably about 100 CCs that come to my dock at dinner time, I feed as much as my wallet will allow!

I feed for 1 second twice a day and use 2 bags of AM500 a month.. My feeder throws out quite abit in one second though..

I'm following a prescription almost exactly like yours for my 8 acre pond. I stocked 10,000 2" CNBG/RES plus FHM and GS in November of 2009 then I put 250 2" LMB in the pond last June. I've got 4 Texas Hunter feeders throwing AquaMax up to 3 times per day. My annual spend is about $2500 for AquaMax ($33/bag) and I'm only using it as a supplement - the fish clean it up FAST and I could easily double or triple my annual spend. Good luck getting Threadfins. I'm 0 for 2 getting them delivered over the past two years.

The key here is Supplemental feeding. That means not all the food they will eat (satiation). Watch your water quality the more you feed like an aquaculture operation.

With 3 lakes and supplemental feeding ( feeding times and amounts change with the conditions)and 4 feeders for 36 acres the cost is about $1500 a year. AM 600 and GFC and some AMLM for the HSB(by hand - 5 bags or less). We don't try to keep the LMB on feed as it has not worked well in our situation (they like live prey and tend to get off the feed). Some LMB do still eat pellets. For most of the feeding season we feed 1 second 3 times a day. For a few weeks at max feeding temp we feed 3 times for 2 seconds. Hand feeding on weekends adds about 15% +- (compensatory feeding).

Now this bolsters Esshup's point. Our fish using that plan will eat all the food in under 1 min. (2 min if using the higher setting). They would IMO eat 10 times that much if we tried to feed to satiation. Then the price would go from 1500 to 15000 and that does not include feeding the LMB. What we would get from that would be way to many fish to harvest leading to either skinny overcrowded populations or an ever increasing food bill. Water quality problems would likely arise also.

Many other factors to consider , location , water quality/productivity , species , harvest , fishing pressure , goals etc.

So you must be south of the Tehachapi mountain range in order to legally stock Tilapia.

Welcome (back) to Pond Boss David, please keep this thread going with updates. We have very few pond meisters from California it's always good to hear from another one.

Thanks.

Ok from the info I have gathered here to budget on annual feed costs the rule of thumb is -

2 bags of feed per month per feeder, feeding 9 months per year at a rate of 1 second feed @ 3 times per day. Feed cost at $ 35.00 per bag.

Annual cost and number of bags of feed = $ 630.00 / 18 bags.

So my 9 acre pond with 3 feeders should budget = $ 1,890.00 / 54 bags.

Thanks.

Dave