We Have Smallmouth Bass for Sale!

The fastest growth rate I have seen documented for smallmouth bass in any of the scientific literature on the species talks about a few exceptional fish in a lake in Washington state that hatched out in March and were four inches long by October. We spawned our smallmouth in three ponds at our fish farm this year; in February, we drained those three ponds down to puddles and killed off the fish in the puddles with rotenone. We then refilled the ponds and moved our broodstock smallmouth into them the first week of March. Smallmouth fry began hatching out in April.

When bass fry first hatch, they’re about 1/8” long, so small you can barely see them. Several smallmouth that hatched from eggs as 1/8” fry in April 2026, are now already 4” long the second week of June - four inches of growth in two months.

Our broodstock came from Dale Hollow Lake, which produced the world record smallmouth in 1955, a fish that weighed eleven pounds fifteen ounces. We travel to Dale Hollow every year to catch more broodstock so we have plenty and also to refresh the genetics at our farm and guard against inbreeding.

We started raising smallmouth in 2020, but are just having our first legitimate crop this year. We had a few dozen smallmouth that hatched out in the spring of 2024 and were between eight and twelve inches long when we seined our larger broodstock in March 2025; those same fish averaged over two pounds each this March. These fish will make two pounds easily in two years from stocking as fingerlings if stocked into a pond with just a decent forage base.

What will happen if they’re stocked into a larger pond or smaller lake that has lots and lots of forage? You’ll eventually have eight- or even ten-pound smallmouth.