Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Feeding Feeder Finally Up - How Much and How Often

Well if I ever wanted to try duck hunting this may be the time to do it.

I guess I could put up my deer blind to use as cover at the ponds edge.

Anyone here have any good duck recipes?

Dr. Catmandoo! Paging Dr. Catmandoo!

Ok I just changed my feeder to run 4 times a day at 3-4 seconds each time at the following times.

7am

11am

3pm

7pm


Do you think this is a good idea or would it be considered over feeding?


I am currently using this feeder:

http://www.moultriefeeders.com/productDetail.aspx?id=MFH-PS1



I thought I would feed less food more times a day rather than all at once.

Will this approach work, if so how long should I set each feeding for, and when should I stop feeding in the late morning and early afternoons?

Should I consider changing the times I am feeding?


Thanks

Mr Hello:
Is this the same .25 acre pond you were asking about yesterday?

According to the link you provided, that particular feeder will dispense .8lbs in 4 sec.... X 4 times per day, is over 3lbs of food. Seems like an awful lot for a pond that small.

If it were me, I would watch and see how much of that food is being consumed by the fish, vs. how much sinks to the bottom.

Just feed what they will consume in 10 minutes or so, each time.

Mine will dump a pound a second..

I may need to test run mine and try to catch what it spits out to see what each 4 seconds is really throwing out.

I may know it down to 3 seconds or even 3 feedings then. As I can not afford to feed 3 pounds a day plus seems like a ton of food.

I can tell you though that they eat all that is throws in the morning for sure as that is when I was there.

Plus when I threw more food out they ate it as well, I did this about 3 times by hand and seemed to get eating.

So I either have some hungry fish or too many. (Bank on the second)

Either way say they are eating all the food, and could even eat more would this be too much since the pond is so small?

Have you noticed fatter fish and longer fish since you have start this feeding program?

This yeat not so much but it has only been up about a month.

Last year when I put it up for the first time you could tell the difference. Just by looking at their bellies.

The catsfish were real big and if you rubbed their bellies you could feel the pellets inside.

I am switching to Aquamax so we will see if it makes much more difference or not, should have it in about 2 weeks.

Thanks

Now with the temps getting into the 100's outside, what time of day should I feed now?

I am currently feeding at:

7AM
11AM
3PM
7PM

Please let me know if I need to change or reduce my feedings and should I check both air and water temps to determine what I need to do?

Should I feed at night as well for the CC, say 10PM-4AM?

Thanks

Your gonna go through a $h*tload of food.. Feeding that much that many times a day.. Seems excessive to me.. I feed my fish twice daily for 1 second and I use 100lbs of food in under a month.. If I wanted too I could feed 100 lbs a week but you need to relize all the extra nutrient dumped in your pond.. My fish have grown amazingly in just a couple months I caught a 6-7" bluegill weighing 338grams right under 3/4 of a pound so it must be working..

Bluegillerkiller, what time of day do you feed?

How many fish do you think you are feeding?

Mine must not throw much feed as I go through about 50-60 pounds a month.

Either way I just thought for a while it is nice to feed them more but I may just tone it down and see what happens.

I have so many fish in the pond that as long as any of them are hungry they can eat.

Plus the Turtles are eating some as well, I guess I should jut plan to eat them as well.

Early morning and late evening seem to be the best for me.. Usually very little wind to carry the food off.. I'm feeding prolly hundreds hard to say.. I would say mine puts out close to 2lbs a second.. My food is completely ate in 10 mins I could easily feed twice If not 3x's as much but $65 month is my budget right now..

I wasn't sure to start a new thread or join this one, it's my first post.

I've got my first 1/2 acre Aqua-culture farm pond (1,000 LMB 2-4"fingerlings in April 2011.) Stocked some BG for feeders for next year (20 of them.)

The LMBs are all now easily 6" (although I have not checked them, just visually when they are feeding.) Some of them are starting to get wider.

I have a little AquaPro ADF 25 feeder, I had some problems with it and feeder stopped operating properly (it gummed up and I lost the little gear!) So the bass ate all 2,000 minnows and every living thing in my brand new pond (there were about a billion tadpoles that are gone.) I've got solar lights on the pond and on little floating bug pallets, that I think are helping them feed naturally at night and in the evenings.

Now the automated feeder is working again properly. I still have not added more than 40lbs of Aquamax 500 feed to the pond yet. I was feeding them 18 seconds at 7am and 12 seconds at 4pm. What I noticed is at noon, if I feed them they would feed hard again. There's a paper I read about 2x daily feeding vs 4 times daily feeding. The result in the paper was 2x was better than 1x, but that the marginal increase in number of feedings per day, did not justify the 4x feedings. The suggestion was 4x might be better, but not better if you have to pay folks to do it, I have an automated feeder and am going to move to 4x times per day 7:30 - 11:30, 2:30 and 5pm. I chose 5pm, cause I want the fish and food to be metabolized by dark when the DO depletion occurs. The paper suggested that smaller runts or less aggressive fish get their turn to feed better. The data suggested better distribution of growth among the entire population.

May: 2-4" fingerlings (about 8 grams each??) small amt of
Jun: didn't measure but definitely bigger
Jul: fingerlings definitely pushing the 6" mark.
Aug:

My goal was by November to have 8-10 fish, which would weight about 1/4-1/2 lb.

There are too many of moving variables, but this weekend I increased the feed rate to 4 times per day
28 secs in the morning.
12 secs at 11am
12 secs at 2 pm
18 secs at 5 pm

A 20 second burst is about 400 pellets. I found that the fish would clean this up in about 2 minutes or less. I visited at noon once, the automated feeder has a "test" mode, they hit it pretty hard, this is when I realized my times where low and started increasing them steadily (mid 3 week in june).

Note: I don't live in Oklahoma, Ohio is cold and snow. We typically don't get alot of 90+ degree temperature days.

What is the weight of 5", 6", 7", 8" LMB?
What is the typical month over month growth?

Great site. Love the details, questions and discussions. There are so many forum posts which apply to my questions on the feeder, feeder rates, LMB growths. Awesome community.

Ken

Hey I found this:
http://www.bassfishingcourse.com/small_large_bass.html

I was reading away elsewhere and forgot it click update, so this is actually, my 2nd post (it was the first one started though!)

Ken:

I don't have weights for the LMB for ya, but typically we feed fish in ponds the amount of food that they can clean up in 10 minutes.

Do you know the conversion rate for LMB? (Weight of pellets of food to weight of fish flesh?)

Cecil Baird1 used to feed his fish more times per day, but he found that they grew almost as fast feeding 1x or 2x/day and his food bill was less.

If you don't have an O2 meter, I'd think hard about investing in one. An O2 crash will NOT be good.

I don't know what to tell you about feeding the fish during the winter. They have to eat something, but not as much as during the warmer months. Maybe hand feed hydrated food? The warm water fish really slow down eating once water temps drop below 60 degrees.

Once the biomass gets larger, I think you will run into water quality issues if you aren't doing something for waste removal or filtration.