If one is going to attempt all female then why not find some of the florida strain lmb that were in the 4lb range for stocking. It's my understanding most of those sized fish would be female. Double check them like mentioned using a pipet. It would not be cheep but from my experience growing numbers of trophy's is not cheep anyway you look at it.
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I think this idea has potential. Ideally they would be 2 years of age or less. I have no idea what they would cost though I do know Dixie Belle are sold in large sizes. If fish are forage fed, it is very costly to get them to that size. A typical hatchery wouldn't consider it because they can sell BG in 1 to 3 in sizes for over $100 a pound. It would take close to 100 lbs of forage to grow an LMB to 4 lbs. If they have proportioned facilities to produce what the demand would likely be for these fingerling sizes, then the opportunity cost of a 4 lb LMB would be around $10,000. Now I don't think it really costs $10,000 to grow 100 lbs of 1 to 3" fingerlings. Space and especially water is really the limiting factor explaining why fisheries suppliers focus primarily on fingerlings ... plus they are high value, low risk, and low cost products. I don't know for sure, but the Dixie Belles you could purchase in this size range may be culls from their guided lake.
If you were to purchase some there may be a method you could use to cath eggs even if purchased in the fall. I know in trout hatcheries, they use photoperiod and hormones to induce ripeness and readiness to release eggs. This may also be possible with Female LMB. My thoughts for myself were to drain the grow-out in early to mid March (also would probably do a Fall Seine and straws to select females with > 90% accuracy). If I could cath eggs from the largest just prior to spawn I could release them, other wise I could hold them for a while and possible do injections to stimulate egg development to get the positive ID.
I would probably use Todd's F1 fingerlings for grow out.
20 lbs of bg in the 3 to 5" range would be around 3 to 5 bg per pound or lets say 100 bg per 20 lb's of forage. So in a pond with 10 5lb trophy lmb you would be looking at or around 1,000 bg per acre. Just something to think about.
Tracy this would be very costly. Based on my standard weight charts 4" BG are 22 BG/LB . If you devised a plan similar to the one I first posted in the Female Only Spreadsheet. You would need around 600 lbs/acre of them and this would cost $7,920/acre-year at 60 cents a head assuming you could buy them at that price. I've gotta go but will offer some ideas you can chew on in this same post when able.
Were I stocking forage to feed directly I would want to stock the forage so as to grow into the desired lengths. This way, your pond would put some weight on them before they are consumed by those big LMB. Also I would prefer TP over BG because I could be certain that those that outgrew the LMBs' propensity to eat them would be purged from the system during winter. Your pond can produce both TP and BG. But TP have advantages because of the mouthbrooding nature. Also they tend to grow faster than BG. So for at least the larger bass I think they are better forage provided they die off each year. When you stock TP in the spring, they will produce more >3" fingerlings if the standing weight of BG is lower. BG will offer some competition and predation so it may prove beneficial to remove a reasonable weight of them so more TP fry survive. There will be more BG recruitment as well as TP recruits IMHO. Ideally you want more than half the weight of TP adults to be females but likely they will be dominated by males. 20 lbs of TP females can produce 40,000 free swimming fry every 3 to 4 weeks or so. In a forage pond most will grow to advance fry stage of 1 to 1.5". In your pond, it will depend on how many are eaten by small bass and big bluegill. A stocking of 40,000 fry of 1" in length only weighs in at 50 lbs but even if only 10% survive to 5" in length at the end of the season, you're going into die-off with 620 lbs of forage. This doesn't include of course their offspring and the forage the other 36000 TP fry supplied as they were eaten.
To be sure you wouldn't want to pay a $1 each ($40000) for the those fry but if the weight of adults is 50 % female, less then $600 would buy the adults that could produce them free swimming in 4 weeks. This begs the question, why can't we find TP forage to stock that is the length of FHM for something close to price of FHM? I know Overton's sells TP of the 3" to 6" lengths which are available late Summer and Fall. They are ideal for large LMB especially at that time of year and the cost is reasonable at $13/lb but what would be even better is to have 1.5" fry available beginning mid-June at a cost of $25-$35 dollars a pound.
