After my grandfather retired from Texaco, his boss from Texaco asked him to run his North Texas farm for him. It's about 550 acres with several stocked ponds and a small lake. I grew up hunting and fishing this farm, as well as, hauling hay, raising cattle, and anything else you can imagine happens on a farm, with my grandfather. The ponds always had good bass, crappie, and catfish in them, along with the blue gills and sunfish.

I fished these ponds heavily until I went to college, and for the most part, my father and I were the only two people that every really fished them. We kept them managed pretty well. It wasn't uncommon to catch 2lb. crappie and 5-6 lb. bass along with 10-15lb. catfish.

However, once I left for college, neither my dad, nor myself fished there much and over time the lack of management meant they became over run with little bass. You could show up any time of day and throw out a curly tailed grub and catch 20 or more little bass, but nothing bigger. The number of fish got to the point where it outnumbered the food supply and the fish just weren't growing.

I finished college and then grad-school and moved back close to home, so now we've started fishing there again and trying to manage the ponds and lake better. We've cleaned out quite a few of these small bass, but it's been six or seven years since we pulled a crappie out of one of the ponds and that had me really disappointed. I finally got to the point where I thought they had just been phased out by the bass. There was one particular pond which had always been guaranteed to get you a stringer full of nice crappie and it seemed to have completely dried up except for little bass.

Well, this weekend I got in on Friday night and went over there. I've never failed to catch some bass, at this place, with a 7" Culprit Texas rigged maroon colored worm. The moss in the shallow areas was thick so fishing the weedless worm was the best option. For the first time in years, I was able to catch 6 nice bass, and it seemed that perhaps our attempts at management was finally making some changes in the bass population.

The next morning Dad and I headed back and caught five more decent bass. Our last spot was the crappie pond and again it seemed like we were only going to catch little bass out of it until right before we were ready to leave. I hooked a fish and first thought it was a bass. I've rarely been more excited to catch a fish when I saw that it was a nice sized crappie. I was dancing around like a little kid yelling, "They're still in here...They're still in here!!!!" Dad got a kick out of it.

Needless to say that was very encouraging. Hopefully we can work that crappie population back to what it used to be by fishing out some more of those smaller bass.

Sorry for the long read, just thought I would share.

You may want to cull some of the bass out of your crappie hole and stock some more crappie. The bass are eating all the food for your crappie.

It sounds like you and your Dad have one fun projuct ahead of you.

Good luck,

Richard

keep culling and re-introduce some bait fish to help out as well...best of luck

We've been culling the bass as much as we can. I did talk to my dad about putting some more crappie in, but we haven't decided on it yet. I'm heading back that way in a week or two and I'm going to try fishing a little differently that we have recently. Maybe I can nail down where the crappie are holing up in this pond and get a sense of just how many there are.

How big is the crappie pond, and how deep do you think it gets? You may able to do a fish population survey with a seine net to get a good idea where you stand with the crappie (and other species) relative to numbers, size and condition.

Not to mention the bass eating the crappie themselves.

The crappie are also eating all the food for the crappie.

I wouldn't put more crappie in until you can re-establish the food source, like fat head minnows or whatever. Crappie will eat anything small that moves. Crappie will survive in a bass infested pond better than bass fry will survive in a crappie infested pond.

I love fishing good farm ponds. But, most farm ponds do not turn into good fishing ponds. Small ponds are very difficult to manage for good fishing. Larger ponds can offer some really good Bass and Crappie fishing. Most of the ponds can offer decent catfishing, but I haven't seen many that can offer Bass-Crappie-Catfish without some management in keeping the numbers in balance.

I recently fished a farm pond that was constructed in 1965 and the Bass/Crappie fishing was exceptional. The pond was about 1.5 acres and was stocked with native Texas Bass, Crappie, and a few Blue Cats. No real management had been tried, but the pond is fished regularly and eating size fish removed. We caught and kept a limit of Crappie, 11"-13", and a dozen bass with three of them over 2 lbs. We saw no obviously stunted fish, and this tells me the Bass/Crappie population is well balanced. The owner attributes this to the small Blue Cat population. We didn't fish for Blues, but they have caught some decent Blues on occasion and removed them.

Obviously something natural is keeping the populations in this pond balanced. I know and have fished another pond, about this same size that has had good Bass and Crappie populations even though it gets fished just sporadically. It is over 60 years old and no one knows the stocking history of it. It went over 20 years in the 1960s-1970s without anyone even seeing it or fishing it. It also has Channel Cats that offer good fishing. This pond has produced 8 lb Native TexAS bass.

Both of these ponds have no structure but do have stumps and moss as well as some water weeds. They are probably the exception rather than the rule, but do show that very good fishing can be had in farm ponds with or without a lot of management.