WHY SHOULD YOU HAVE US STOCK YOUR POND?

There are lots of hatcheries in the South that sell fish. Several do fish trucks weekly every spring and fall at hundreds of farm stores across the Southeast. Several companies deliver fish to landowners and stock them into the pond for you.

So, what’s the difference between pond stocking services with them and us? Our chief biologist, Walt Foreman, has been stocking and managing private ponds since 1987, longer than any other private biologist working in this region.

Stocking

First-time Stocking.

Those few minutes when your new or renovated pond is being stocked for the first time are the most crucial few minutes in the history of your pond: they can make or break your fishery. When stocking — sometimes referred to as “fish planting” — something as simple as stocking the wrong species for your goals, such as channel catfish if your goal is trophy largemouth or trophy bluegill, or a species that isn’t recommended for ponds such as black crappie, can set your pond on a trajectory that can’t be changed short of rotenoning the pond and starting over. Even the simple mistake of stocking the wrong numbers of the right species can put your pond out of balance for your goals.

Choosing the right company.

Beware of companies that offer fish stocking packages. These are more about making money for the hatchery than about the health of your pond. Any company that is worth buying your fish from should take the time to ask you about your goals for the pond while also asking you about the pond itself: its size, depth, and water quality, along with how intensively or casually it will be managed. No two ponds are alike, just as no two pond owners are. The same fish numbers can be good and disastrous in two different ponds of the same size if one is managed and one is not. Almost every state that has any literature about fish stocking, if said literature mentions hybrid bluegill, notes specifically that hybrid bluegill should never be stocked with pure bluegill because doing so will cause genetic issues; TWRA’s pond booklet, for example, has this caution. And yet one hatchery that advertises extensively in this state includes both northern and hybrid bluegill in all of its stocking packages — because packages are about their profit and not your quality of fishing.

Another thing to keep in mind when choosing a fish stocking company to stock your pond is where the fish are originating. We raise some of the fish we stock for our customers; we also get some fish from other fish farms. The largemouth bass and bluegill we stock come from fish farms in southern climates; all of the largemouth and bluegill that we raise on our farm are subspecies native to Florida. This is important because these fish will grow much faster and get much larger than northern largemouth and northern bluegill. The Tennessee state record largemouth came from a lake that TWRA has been stocking with pure Florida largemouth since 2001, Lake Chickamauga. We recently made a blog post about a coppernose bluegill that was caught in August 2020 from a pond we stocked as a new pond in March 2016; that bluegill was not weighed but may have been a new state record – at four years old.

Trophy Pond is the only fish stocking hatchery in the world that sells hand-painted bluegill.

OUR FISH

We are one of only two hatcheries anywhere in the U.S. offering feed-trained redear.

 

We will begin selling these amazing fish sometime in late spring/early summer 2021. These fish will get dramatically bigger than non-feed-trained redear, just as bluegill get dramatically bigger when fed than when they are not.

We also raise our strain of coppernose, from brood stock we caught ourselves from the St. Johns River in central Florida and Lake Jackson in the Florida Panhandle. We just recently introduced the Lake Jackson fish to our brood stock, and are very excited about them: Lake Jackson is known for producing some of the largest bluegill of any public lake in the country, as 2-pound bluegill are regularly caught from the lake, a rarity these days on public water.

We are the only fish stocking hatchery in Tennessee that raises pure Florida largemouth. Our brood stock came from two hatcheries in Texas that selectively breed their Floridas for aggressiveness.

We also raise smallmouth bass, pure muskie, and freshwater grass shrimp for your fish stocking needs. We will be adding more species to our farm in the next year.