Lake Management for Large Private Lakes in the Southeast

Every private lake is different, and every lake has different needs. Whether you’re looking for fishery management or aquatic vegetation control, structural repair or help improving the resale value of your property, Trophy Pond has the experience, manpower, and equipment to do the job right the first time.

We specialize in fishery management, everything from developing trophy bass and trophy bluegill fisheries to creating multi-function fisheries with the emphasis on fun. Our breadth of experience in this realm is unmatched anywhere in the Southeast, and we have the results to prove it.

We also excel in aquatic vegetation control. We utilize a range of strategies, from phosphorus abatement to targeted, precise application of approved aquatic herbicides. We offer mechanical dredging with conventional excavation equipment, which is many times more cost-effective and efficacious in removing silt and muck from lake bottoms than suction dredges.

Lake management for 8–100+ acre private lakes

Here are some things to look for when choosing a lake management company:

We have dozens of photos of trophy bass and trophy bluegill that have been caught by hook and line from dozens of lakes and ponds we manage. If the only trophies a company shows on their IG or website are from electrofishing surveys, it likely means the landowner never catches his big fish when he fishes, and only gets to see those big fish when they’re hit by AC current.
Many companies are content to spray your lake every month on an ongoing basis, because it makes them money. True aquatic vegetation control finds and addresses the root cause. Herbicides have their place; they’re often less costly than targeting the cause; but herbicide applications are by nature recurring.
Multiple studies have found that fish prefer natural cover, such as sunken logs, rocks, and aquatic vegetation, between 5:1 and 8:1 over man-made habitat such as PVC trees. We never sell you products that don’t work just to pad our bank account. Our habitat plans are built on the species of fish you’re targeting for management, and what will yield the best outcome for that species.
Aquatic vegetation is nature’s habitat for fish. If you kill every last particle of plants in your lake, your fish will be puny. If fish aren’t a priority, and swimming and boating are, you may want the lake free of all weedgrowth; if the fish are a priority, a responsible plan for aquatic vegetation should target control, not obliteration, of aquatic plants.
Most lake management companies have no capability to do structural work on a lake. If your lake needs dredging, they will refer you to someone; if your lake has shallow areas that need deepening to mitigate weedgrowth in those areas, they’ll refer you. We have our own heavy equipment division, with three bulldozers, three excavators, two padfoot compactors, and a 40-ton off-road dump truck; we have our own equipment operators and general contractor’s license with a heavy excavation endorsement. Our lime barge, unlike those of most other companies, is not a makeshift boat cobbled together from a home-made wooden platform and dock floats; our barge was custom-built by a company that specializes in large aluminum boats. That same barge gives us habitat-enhancement capabilities that our competitors don’t have.
Many lake management companies buy all the fish they stock for their customers wholesale from fish hatcheries and truck them to the customers. We raise most of the fish we stock ourselves, which allows us to better control fish genetics, health, and quality. We are the only fish farm in Tennessee that raises pure Florida bass, the only farm in Tennessee that raises smallmouth bass, and the only commercial fish hatchery anywhere in the country that raises handpainted bluegill. We also raise freshwater grass shrimp, the cold-hardy palaemonetes kadiakensis species, and feed-trained redear.
Our owner Walt Foreman has twenty-eight years of experience managing private ponds and lakes for landowners. A biologist that just got out of college a year or three ago doesn’t have the first-hand experience with all the things that can go wrong with a lake; we do. If you don’t think experience makes a difference, take a look at that competitor’s fish pictures, and then take a look at ours.