Anyone ever use a hand dug well to raise edible fish or seafood?

6' diameter- 25' deep. 3000 gallons? +\- depending on rainfall?

Ideas / options?

Temps should stay 55 degrees even in dead of winter, right? It would be covered so no wind.

Catfish on bottom? Mesh on walls for fresh water prawn/ snails (harvest seasonally) etc, blue gill and trout can take low temps. Blue gill is coldest ive found down to 40! Turtles, frogs, snakes?

Winter survival is one thing but will it stay too cold for fish to spawn and grow properly? Maybe its only good as a holding tank...?

Obviously we would need aeration, and circulation/ clean out pump

Thx all!

Though I appreciate that you are trying to make a use of this well, I am going to discourage you from doing it this way. To begin, the juice will be very small with respect to the squeeze due to limited space and chilly temperature. To make matters worse, you risk contaminating a subterranean water source that could adversely affect neighbors. Finally, the waters are probably protected and such action as this could come at the risk of fines and up-river time.

If there is a good flow into the well, a better plan would be to use it for a water source of a surface pond by pumping water from it to maintain water level and water quality in your surface pond. This would be legal and you could grow a meaningful amount of food with a plan like this.

Welcome to the forum, I'm the guy who pointed you here.

Read around a bit about the needs of all of the fish you want. I think youll be surprised at how complicated it is.

IMO to raise fish to eat in your situation:

1-Build a real pond, even if its 'small' like 25x25 and as deep as it can be. Built like a painters tray. Make sure its deep enough for winter.
2-Invest in a large aquaponics tank or other fish tank. Aquaponics may be perfect for your homestead.

Concentrate on 1 type of fish you want to be eating (i.e. bluegill).
Then concentrate on making sure they have food to eat (via aquaponics or stocking forage).

If you can swing the construction maybe start with the 25x25 pond and start it off with crawfish and minnows.

After they get off a few spawns add the bluegill and let them feast on minnows. The crawfish will be another food source for you.


LONG term this becomes your 'forage' pond to make a 'real' pond 50x100ish or bigger. I.e. you put bass and bluegill in that one and continuously add to their forage from the original pond.

Very little chance of it working. Without sunshine, nothing works.

Also I would SWAG that there would be very little O2 in the well water for fish to survive.

Yep, without either/or sunshine or wind(wave) action, water isn't oxygenated. That's why it is best when filling or adding water to a pond from a well, it needs to be run over rocks to break it up.

My buddy Geoff bought a farm down the road from us and is using the old surface well to raise koi. It is about 8 feet in diameter and maybe 20 feet deep. They seem to be doing quite well in there. I would imagine you might also be able to raise catfish in such a setup easily as well.