Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Creating the food chain Question about feeding / size of feed/etc.

BJ Nick, it all depends on how much you want to feed, and how fast (and large) you want your fish to grow. More feed = faster growth, bigger fish.

If your fish aren't feed trained, then I'd feed very minimally every day (7 days a week) at the same time and at the same place in the pond. I would concentrate on feeding in no more than 4' of water, where the prevailing wind will blow any uneaten feed over deeper water and not back to the bank. Feed them every day until you get a great, consistent feed response, then cut back to 5 days a week like Bill said.

I look at feeding fish in a pond 4 different ways.
1) Minimal supplemental feed to help fish get through "lean times" once they are consistently eating the food, which means feeding them on a regular basis but only feeding feed them enough that they can consume it all in 2-3 minutes. That keeps them conditioned to the feed, so that way if you want to feed more, they will know what the feed is and eat it more readily.

2) Feeding what they can consume in 10 minutes once a day to get them to grow faster but still have them consume a lot of natural forage in the pond.

3) Grow them moderately fast by feeding them what they can consume in 15 minutes 2x or even 3x day to have them still consume some natural forage but have them getting the majority of food from the artificial feed.

4) Grow fish in the pond the biggest and fastest that you can without creating a production pond. That means feeding them to satiation every day.

A customer wants to grow some big fish in his pond. 4 acre pond, but he only has 1 Texas Hunter Feeder that feeds 15 seconds 2x day but most evenings he also walks around the pond feeding the fish 2 coffee cans of food. We now are starting to have to plan on mitigating excess nutrients in the pond, but he also has 5 - 6 tiles feeding runoff from the surrounding corn/bean fields into his pond. Here's one of the fish from his pond.

It could weigh more since it is 12.5" in length, as much as possibly 3/4 pound more if it were to eat more food.