Howdy Booner!

Welcome to the PB forum. Congrats on your new pond.

Your pond is just under 1/12 of an acre and I would recommend that you do not stock LMB. It would be tough row to hoe. An option would be channel catfish or possibly a male only BG pond. Of course there are other options. But considering you have a nearby source for BG I would consider the male BG option. You will need to be perfect at identifying males in order to be successful at this approach. It isn't tough to do if the BG are mature when you sex them.

I had success in a public pond where two ponds were side by side. I would catch male BG off the dam and throw them into pond above. Worked really great until someone very fond of BG harvested them out. Then LMB and other BG showed up and the fun was over. Even so, a 6" fish grew to > 9" in 1 year which is outstanding growth. Below is a SS showing a 3 year grow out of male only BG with a target harvest size > 10" and a maximum standing weight of a little over 400 lbs/acre. You would just stock 10 males a year and harvest fish > 10" in length. Shouldn't be too time consuming to manage that.

Right now you should get FHM going as these will increase the growth of your BG. It may turn out that the BG grow much faster than the SS suggests. If so you could adapt by increasing the stock rate and harvesting the BG sooner (as a opposed to 3 years later maybe 1 or 2 instead).

Attached Images
Male BG Small Pond.xlsx (10.57 KB, 191 downloads)
SHA1: 16c57b89989c6a413355a2bac2e8b20434fbc3c2
Last edited by jpsdad; 10/28/20 02:06 PM. Reason: standing weight of 400 lbs is in LBS/ACRE

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