Another thing, seek some professional help. Either the local NRCS guy or someone who is familiar with building ponds in your area (might or might not be a local dozer contractor).
If you do not know what you are getting into with your soils and subsoil, you might end up with a leaky mud puddle.
In my immediate area, our soils are pretty forgiving of pond builders. But get in other areas that have sandy soils or other challenges, and pond building is a lot more complicated than making the bowl and pushing up the dam. The bigger a pond and dam get, the more critical things get, but the size you are looking at should be pretty modest in those terms.
Do a search for leaky ponds on this forum and there are no shortage of ponds that were built, leak like a sieve, and very unhappy pond owners that end up spending a lot of time and money to fix the problem. As esshup would tell me, do it right the first time. Just be sure what your are getting into before you start. Your pond building might be straight forward and relatively easy that about any farmer of years could do, to something much more complicated like needing compacted clay liners, plastic liners, etc. My NRCS guy was very helpful in giving us some options of a plan and laying out the pond site for us, as well as helping me avoid common pitfalls.
We did our own pond, but I had construction friends for advice and a couple employees that had run construction equipment and one that was involved in building several ponds. Plus I had built and cleaned out a couple ponds many, many years ago with an old cable dozer I had owned back then.
Last edited by snrub; 02/13/14 07:40 AM.
