Supplement Fish feeding

Are you curious about supplement fish feeding? Listen to why you should consider this type of feeding for your fish from Bob Lusk, the Pond Boss.

What’s all the fuss about feeding fish? Well, I’ll tell you. It’s a lot of fun for one thing. Today, I want to talk to you about supplementally feeding fish.

Now, there are several cases that you might want to think about that. Say, you got a small pond in the backyard. You don’t really want to make the commitment to feed the fish. You don’t want to overfeed them anyway so supplementally feed them. Maybe you’ve got a dock on a public lake out there, and you want to congregate some fish close to you so you can see them and catch them and enjoy them. That’s a good time to do it.

Another good time is like what goes on in this beautiful scenic 75-acre lake right here in the middle of Oklahoma. This lake is full of different species of fish but it wouldn’t be practical to try to feed the entire population. It would take about 40 feeders, and probably $5,000 a month to feed them to fill them up. So a good idea, here, is to feed off the dock. Now this dock and boathouse behind us is a great place for congregating fish, as well as people. This is a social gathering point. This is a party spot, and when people come out here, one of the first things they want to do is see the fish. So supplementally feeding is a great idea.

Now, let’s just talk about that. How are you going to decide to do it? Well, this fish food probably costs around 50 or 60 maybe 70 cents a pound for the best fish food, and it takes about two pounds of feed for a fish to gain one pound. That’s pretty economical, a dollar to a dollar fifty. If you go buy fish by the pound, they’re way more than that. Just think about the supermarket prices or the retail hatchery prices.

Feeding these fish, it does a number of things to help the fish also. it takes these fish in this regional localized area out of competition with the other game fish because there’s some fish that won’t eat fish food. Walleye, Smallmouth Bass, Largemouth Bass that aren’t trained to feed won’t eat this fish food, but the fish that they eat will, such as Bluegill, some of the minnows. So it’s a great idea to put some feed out there and take those fish out of the competition.

I’ll tell you another really important reason to do it. There was some fish in this lake, four or five years ago, bluegill that were about eight or nine inches long by supplementally feeding off this dock twice a day with a feeder. They’ve taken those eight nine inch bluegill and turned them into a true trophy fish sort of eleven or twelve inches long, weigh a pound and a half to a pound and three quarters, and that is a giant fish that any angler would love to sink a fly into.

So i’m going to tell you consider supplementally feeding fish. It’s a great idea. It doesn’t cost much money to feed two or three pounds a day. A 50 pound bag will last a month. You spend $25 or $30 to take care of these fish. They’ll thank you for it when you’re done, and you’re going to have these fish that you can come up and when the kids come out on the dock to watch them they’ll even name them, and that’s part of the fun of having a pond or a lake.