TEXAS WILDLIFE
POND MANAGEMENT
When Smaller May Be Better Article and photos by DR. BILLY HIGGINBOTHAM, Professor Emeritus, The Texas A&M University System
This 1/3-acre pond is ideal for producing catfish but is too deep to harvest by seining.
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ifty years ago, the Texas Agricultural Extension Service, now Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service, embarked on a series of catfish production result demonstrations utilizing small farm ponds scattered across the northeastern one-third of the state. The demonstrations’ stated goal was to investigate the viability of using small existing impoundments for catfish production, most of which served primarily as livestock water sources. The idea was managing these waters to successfully increase farm nutrition, recreation and sometimes income by raising edible-size channel and/or blue catfish. Texas is home to more than 1 million private impoundments and many, if not
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most, are well under one surface acre in size. While generally deemed as too small to manage for largemouth bass on a sustained basis, AgriLife Extension fisheries specialists believed that these smaller waters were suitable production units for species that would accept a pelleted ration. To be successful, a series of Best Management Practices had to be developed in order to demonstrate the viability of improving unmanaged ponds that typically averaged only 100 pounds of fish (many of which were under-sized and or undesirable species for consumption) per surface acre. Over the next decade, the Best Management Practices became wellestablished following hundreds of these catfish production demonstrations that
MARCH 2021
proved that with proper management, these small waters that previously produced 100 pounds of fish per surface acre increased 10-fold to 1,000 pounds of edible-sized catfish per surface acre per year. One of the challenges in evaluating the success of these demonstrations was the ability to monitor total fish production by harvesting and weighing all of the fish produced at the end of the annual growing season in November-December. While many ponds can be utilized to produce catfish up to the 1,000-pound level, only those that could be harvested via seining provided the total production data needed to evaluate success. As word spread about the viability of these small waters producing 1,000 pounds of edible-size catfish per surface
