Pond Boss Forums AERATION Should I aerate? Windmill Aeration

Backwater G-Man - PART 1. Part 2 next time. It's getting past bed time. Simple question; but complex answer; at least to answer it with informative detail.
Completely circulating a long narrow pond with fingers is more of a problem than circulating a basiclly round or square pond that tapers down into a basic roundish basin. I'm getting ahead of myself.
Your question, "IS AERATION REALLY THAT BENEFICIAL?". It must be good that's why everything you read praises it. You will find little or nothing saying aeration is bad. A few exceptions can occur in very special rare situations.
Every pond owner that I've sold an aerator to or convinced to circulate their pond with air injection aeration has only good things to say about doing it. None will give up their bottom injection "aerator" and none will go back to not circulating their pond. So the answer is definately YES, especially to the overal health of the pond and bottom sediments. This overall general healthy condition translates into a larger fish carrying capacity of the pond (more & bigger fish). NOTE: Air injection has to be done correctly with some basic knowledge because some ill-informed pondowners have had bad first time experiences and even killed fish after installing a bottom injector due to being unaware of the basics of aeration and just proceeding "blindly".
The larger fish carrying capacity after aeration is basiclly due to the pond's ability to produce more food for the fish which is due to enlarging the space/area for fish food production by providing oxygen to bottom sediments which would have otherwise had no DO.
It's kind of like asking if oxygen is beneficial to your lower leg? Without disolved oxygen (DO) in your blood, your lower leg will quickly start to have bad things happen to it. The same thing basically happens to the living things in the deep water, bottom sediments when the DO is exhausted from respiration of the bottom dwelling invertebrates/critters. DO is not naturally replaced or replenished at the deeper mud water interface when the circulation stops during summer stagnation (ie. below the thermocline). This happens every summer to most every pond/lake in the northern hemisphere that is not a year round, trout type lake(oligotrophic- those with very low nutrient budgets).
Next time: PART 2 Excerpts from Elmer Hedlund's article in Pond Boss Sept/Oct 1995 - Three Keys to a Healthy Pond, pH, fertility and oxygen necessary for success.