It all depends on the customer and their goals as to how many are stocked. I will put between 50 and 100 pounds per acre in my pond, I stock a city park pond with 250#/acre but they get fished out pretty quickly. Minimum delivery is 50# or it just isn't worth the time and expense driving to a pond to stock them. They are more fragile than other fish, so more care has to go into hauling them than other fish which equals to more overhead.

Stocking starts when water temp is in the low 60°F range and the trout will live until the water temp warms up to 70°F the following Spring. Only one customers pond had the trout survive over the summer but his pond is exceptionally deep and we did some playing with the aeration system to get the deepest water oxygenated while still keeping it cold enough for the trout. If someone wants to do that to their pond we can do that, but I won't say here on the board what we did to get them to survive - we have to keep some of what we learned over the years to ourselves and not give everything away. Does KFC give out their batter recipe?

During the winter the trout will continue to eat floating pellets providing the pond is not iced over so I think they will hit top water. For sure they hit spinners/spoons/curly tail jigs/crank baits at a greater frequency than any other fish in the pond during the winter. When ice fishing they are caught more frequently than even Yellow Perch. I talked to a guy at the city park pond that caught and released 342 of the 1,000 trout that we stocked last year, and some of the trout that he caught were caught before, they still had the hook in them. If hooked deeply, he'd just cut the line and release them.

I stocked a dozen Golden Rainbow Trout in a very good customers pond as a prank without telling him. I got a phone call when he pulled one out, "What the @#&! is this fish? I've never seen it before??" He wasn't upset, just wondering just what this golden colored fish was. He caught all 12 while ice fishing, and the pond is 4 acres.

Up here, they need to be harvested by mid May to the end of June, depending on the year to get them out before they die.

We typically stock RBT that weigh a pound each, but we have stocked fish that were two pounds each. just due to availability.

Trout will put on weight exceptionally fast if fed a good fish food. I stocked a few of the 2#'ers in my pond, and when caught in early June they were 7# and 24" long. It seems that trout will convert a good commercial fish food like Optimal Bass food at almost a 1:1 ratio.