Building a 5 acre lake in SWMS

The dirt work can add up, especially if you don’t have a good clay layer, but in that area you should hit red clay. Talk to your local co-op about getting someone to come out and do core samples. No way to know what they’ll quote you for a dam until those results come in, if you have mostly red clay and they can just move and pack you’re looking at $10-15K, if they need to build a core for the dam and lay a blanket it can get cost prohibitive.

As far as stocking, pondboss forums are going to get you pointed in the right direction, but that’s a ways out, and the best practice will depend on your goals. Biggest mistake people make with a pond is to assume it can ever find some balance that will take care of itself. It’s always moving in some direction, and it’ll be up to you to harvest more or adjust in some way, and that can be a lot of work. A trophy bass pond has certain requirements, and they’re counterproductive to a pond that lets you harvest a lot of large bream, or contains channel cats, etc.

IMO, depending on location it may be a detriment to the movement of deer.

How long does the dam need to be, how many surface acres and how many drainage acres?

I am looking at a spot for about 4-5 acre lake. Dam only needs to be about 100 yards long and has 30-40 acres of drainage. My concern is the proximity of clay, size of the overflow (given large drainage area). I was surprised by the drainage area when I mapped it all out with lidar maps. Location is awesome as it’s a corner of my property that kinda gets no use and is a dead end for deer movement. I’m waiting on a callback from soils guy with NRCS.

Never hurts to have a year round water source with deer and turkey, but I wouldn’t expect it to make things night and day different.

Crappie are a controversial subject in ponds, some will tell you they’ll overcrowd it instantly, but my experience has been that without adequate spawning cover they don’t reproduce well and will just grow out, like catfish. One thing you can count on, they are going to cut the food chain off at the knees so any other predator species aren’t going to thrive. You’ll need to establish native or copper nose bluegill that spawn multiple times a summer and let them get too big to eat before introducing crappie. If you start noticing small crappie, you’ll need to aggressively remove them or they will become overcrowded and stunted.

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But I think dirt work was around 85K. Diesel is high as giraffe pussy

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Wow. We ain’t paying that. I was thinking 10k for a 5 acre lake. Using the hills on one side.

Maybe we will just do Florida bass.

In the hills of SWMS, you should be looking for a spot with a dam that is short compared to the rest of the perimeter. Otherwise it will be a ton of dirt work.

Anytime. I’m over that way a good bit if you need food plots, road’s cleared , etc.

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We ain’t paying that. I was thinking 10k for a 5 acre lake

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We were looking to build a 2 acre in Amite County. We got quotes from 25K to 40 K. Core samples came back with too much sand so we decided against building.

You can’t build a cow pond for 10K in 2023

This is really good advice on crappie. They spawn so much earlier than bass and bream, their fry end up chowing down on the other fry. And bass won’t eat them once they are bigger than a couple of inches because they are too spiny, so they will overcrowd a pond that size.

Cheaper to lease your own bull dozer?