Hunter, there are several great pondmeisters from IA on the forum and they can chime in. My advice, (advice that was hammered home to me when I was in your same situation by the PB team here and served me VERY WELL) is that you MUST NOT put anything in your pond except forage until the end of next year. Your weather in SW IA might be a bit more mild and your 'growing season' or number of spawns might be more than us in the north, but still, you must not lose this chance to build a diverse forage base. You only have one chance, you have to use restraint and think about your future goals.

There are many good threads on how to plan forage depending on your goals. For example a trophy CC pond is very different from a trophy LMB pond. In fact many would say that putting both CC and LMB in a pond could be a bad recipe. But in a 4 acre pond the stocking ratios and goals are very different than most of us who have smaller ponds.

Since your pond is so large and deep, it might even take you 2 full growing seasons to properly prepare your forage base. Although it seems like a punishment to wait, you will have so much fun trying to find different forage species, watching them grow and become visible in various places in your pond and then when they are big enough and in numbers that will survive predation, then you can add your apex predator.

You must have thought about pond structure or fish 'lanes' when building the pond? Do you have pictures? Share your goals, what type of fishing, what do you hope to use the pond for?

Welcome to PB!