Dave,

You didn't mention the size of fish you wanted to harvest. In food fish production, the goal is to produce harvestable fish in a growing cycle. Usually this requires a separate stage which goal is to produce stage 1 fingerlings. So in your case you plan to acquire stage 1 trout fingerlings. Given your summertime temps, this could give you an extended growing season and perhaps summer survival of your trout.

I would just mention, for food fish production, summer survival of you trout is not essential. You could to stock in Fall after temps cool down and then harvest in late spring/ early summer before they succumb to water quality. We have member that 8-tupled the weight of his stocking of trout under the ice! So he didn't stock as densely as you probably will, but also doesn't feed, so this tells us that trout will grow a very low temperatures if food is abundant. You could add to whatever natural growth you get after ice out by feeding until harvest time.

When planning to maintain populations beyond a single growing cycle the efficiency of food production goes way down. This is mostly due to the maintenance requirements but where the conditions allow for reproduction, recruitment destroys production. To optimize production, you must harvest over each cycle and try to do a complete harvest. This is true whether the fish could survive all seasons or not (eg trout dying in summer ... TP dying in winter).

Given the summer time temps, I like your trout idea. For forage I like FHM, scuds, and water sowbugs. These will all convert detritus and waste from feeding into food for the trout.

Given the summer time temps, I question whether warm water species like lepomis, CC, and TP would grow well. People further South could combine them with trout however for a remarkably productive two cycles per year two crop system.


It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble, it's what we know that ain't so - Will Rogers