Sorry for not responding sooner. For the record, while 12 seconds sounds like a lot, my feeders are definitely not tossing out a 1/4lb per second. I did measure a 10 second throw a while back and only got a little over a 1lb of food (really need to start logging and writing this stuff down somewhere). Unfortunately, what I have noticed is that the first second tosses out quite a bit, while subsequent seconds are far less. My feeders are unfortunately tossing a decent amount of food in very shallow water where only minnows can get to it. They are still eating all of it and the number of minnows that hang out under the feeders is about 20x everywhere else in the pond. If there is a decent breeze it will blow the food out into the deeper water where the bluegills will get it. I think this makes up about 1/10th of the food being tossed. Not sure what to do about this, especially when they lake is low like it is now from our drought. I did spread out the total feeding over 3 feeding times (same total number of seconds). I am concerned if I do more feeding times throughout the day that I just make it easier for predators to catch the fish, or at least they will notice there are fish in the pond. This year is wrapping up, so I'm not going to increase the feed times any higher, but it sounds like maybe for at least half of next year I could feed up to a maximum of 6lbs per day (provided the fish are eating all of it) then back that way down following years as fish load from bass and BG start to stress the pond? Right now I do not have any FA problems. At one point I had a very small patch of FA but that was about a month after the pond filled up, pretty sure it was related to other things washing into the pond.

Follow up question: We are finally getting our first noticeable cold front where our high temps will only be around 72 degrees. This is only going to last a few days until we rise back up into the 80s. At what time should I start pulling back on the feed for the winter? Is there a water temp that I should be looking for to completely cut the feed off? Last year we had highs in the 80s all the way through November into December. Since the goal is to keep these bluegill growing and spawning I don't want to back the feed off until I know it's not doing any good.

Thanks,
David