My pond is now 3 years old and doing very well with aeration and supplemental feeding. I now am considering starting a culling program for my 8-12” bass.
My question is what uses are there for that small bass? Are they too small to eat? Can I reuse them as fish food?
Thanks for all the expertise on this site!

They're big enough to eat if you think they are. I would definitely fillet any 10" or bigger and see what I thought about the smaller ones.

Definitely would be good to filet what can be used. What does everyone do with the ones that are too small? Any way to recycle them back into pond food base?

You can fry small ones just like you do BG.

Cool! That would work! Thanks!

Fillets from a 10 to 14 incher are really good panfried.

I researched this same topic last week. I saw a few people say they use them as catfish bait, but there may be some legal issues. I feel bad about just throwing them on the bank so I fillet what I can.

Depends on how much work you want to go to, but even the small ones too small to fillet could be gutted and scaled or skinned, then pressure cook bones and all. We have not done it with bass but with BG and you can end up with a product like a very mild tunna out of a can. You can fillet a pretty small fish though with practice and we fillet everything here.

Now that seems like a lot of work, but if you price salmon or tuna in a can and consider how many ounces are in that can (not very many), it might be worthwhile.

A person can just throw them in a bag after cleaning and into the freezer, waiting for a big enough batch to pressure cook.

The new pressure cookers like the Instant Pot are a wonderful improvement over old style pressure cookers in their ease of use. Wife has two different sizes and uses them all the time. We buy lots of fatty cuts of meat and stew them. She makes yogurt at least once a week in one. So they are useful for lots of cooking other than just pressure cooking fish.

Years and years ago we pressure cooked some common carp and it also turned out about like canned tuna.

We are thinking about canning some fish this year. We like tuna, salmon and sardine salads. We pressure cooked some BG the other day and made BG salad out of it and it was good. Carolynn actually measured everything this time in case someone asks, and I guess we should send it in to Lusk for publishing.

Two birds with one stone department: Clip off fins for sub 9 inchers, toss back into the pond. Highly likely to get eaten by the big mommas you want to grow.

Always can count on great suggestions and information on this site! Thank you!

I second the "eat 'em" approach! They taste great.

You can build a cage with netting and pvc to hold them temporarily until you have enough for a fry.

We fillet all cull bass and fry/grill for fish tacos or fried with a side. They are the best to eat in fact, under 14"

I've heard of people putting them in baskets suspended over the water's surface so that flies will lay their eggs on them and the growing maggots will fall into the water and feed the remaining fish.

Well for my part I would suggest as others have mentioned to filet fish >10" and to scale and remove the heads of those that are smaller and then pan fried.

Too small is a matter of perspective. My kids and I like to catch and eat BG. When we catch a mess we keep most everything but certainly some that most folks say are too small. We filet the larger ones and panfry the smaller ones. When there is heaping plate of them, guess which goes first? The pan fry dinks every time. My bride and I have to pull a couple off their plates to even have some. Dang, if you have never tried pan fried BG or small LMB you are missing out on something worth your effort. We fry them in bacon grease and some extra oil, seasoned with Creole seasoning (Tony's) and coated in cornmeal. mmm.

Just an update: we have taken out 15 lbs. of bass from 9-14” and we fried filets in beer batter. The whole family was stunned how delicious they were! Thanks for all the suggestions!
Took out a total of 19 bass so far with about 10-15 lbs. to go this year. That should improve prey availability for the bigger bass to keep growing!
Thanks for all the information!