Glen,
Your minnows are now fish poop. They most likely didn't survive more than a month. Stocking minnows is simply a method to provide a natural snack for your fish. Rarely do minnows survive long enough to reproduce. You can enhance their survival by having flat places for them to lay eggs (oak pallets in shallow water. Also provide a lot of brush cover. If possible, perhaps screen off a section of your pond for minnow production.
Feeding your fish depends on the purpose. For maximum fish production, feed all they can clean up in a ten minute period. Most fish will stop eating when full. Not so with redear, overfeeding redear bream is just a waste of food as they will continue to eat and expel undigested food.
For maximum productivity, feed daily, and feed at the same time each day.
Roughly, two pounds of fish food will produce one pound on fish "on the hoof". A two pound fish provides less than 1 pound of cleaned fish.
Bass and crappie and perhaps blue cats will eat 5 to 10 pounds of fish to produce one pound. That is pretty expensive fish.
If your pond is to provide you with fresh fish, keep the bass and crappie out, scare off all preditors that eat fish. In a natural environment with bass and crappie, you will be lucky have a 1 in 3 survival rate of your stocked fish.
My best calculation for producing a pound of cleaned fish in my natural pond is about $2.16 per pound. This is my worse case senario and assumes no natural reproduction.
