The Homestead Worm Farm
Chicken feed can become expensive! And then when you do the math, you find out that you're really not breaking even when it comes to your flock making eggs and meat. Making a meal worm farm is one way you can off-set the cost to this and at the same time provide a healthy all natural diet to your chickens they will LOVE.
Also, worms poop! Yep, they do! And that manure can be harvested as well. It's called frass. Insect frass is very nutrient dense and great for putting on your garden or sprinkling around your summer tomatoes. It would be a great addition to help grow your soil! Believe it or not, people pay a lot of money for insect frass in organic gardening stores!
The worms multiply very fast. To get started, all you need is a few meal worms. When a beetle hatches from its Pupa stage of life, it will lay anywhere from 100-500 eggs. It will only live about a week. That is some huge exponential growth in a short time after just a few generations! After about 2 months, you may have more worms than you know what to do with....but your chickens will know.
Are you looking for a business opportunity for your homestead? You could sell these farms to other homestead chicken growers.
ENJOY THE VIDEO!
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I had to read the narrative twice before I realized you were talking about mealworms vs earthworms. Fortunately both interest me as a protein supplement to chicken feed, but growing to scale is where I have been having difficulty. Thank you for putting the work into this.
Chickens are not vegetarians. They also eat worms, which are full of Omega3, and the eggs will also contain more of this fatty acid, that is very useful for us. In addition, the chicken feed available in the store is expensive and can be genetically engineered.
This is such a spot on posting to show there are just so many ways to offset the expense of feeding your flock and your garden benefits! Resteemit, upvote!
How does one go about starting this process? Do you have a link for a place to buy the worms/beetles? Thank you for uploading!
There are a number of places online that will sell them to you through the mail. Just google it and pick one. If you decide to build it, come back and post pictures!
thank you friend :)
Whaaa? Chickens are sweet little vegetarians that wouldn't hurt a fly.
Your gonna make someone cry letting them know that chickens would eat your children, if they had the chance.
LOL....so true!
I wish! I can't eat an egg without wondering what mix of things I don't want to know about is in the stuff I'm chewing.
Chicken : what's that on the ground? Yum.
Chicken : what's that on that plant? Yum.
Chicken : what's that that just came out of that other chicken's butt? Yum.
Chicken : hey, there's a mouse! Yum.
Chicken : didn't I eat this yesterday? Yum.
Point taken! I think I'll practice mental factoring of polynomials instead of thinking egg composition.
Really. I bought my son a worm farm as a kid, just for fun. Now going to give it serious thought as an adult. LOL
Great idea! Adding in some chickens or ducks is a future step for our homesteading experiment. I feel like starting with the meal worms may be a benefit to our garden now, with the added bonus of mealworms for our neighbors that raise chickens!!
I love farm fresh eggs so I'm all about doing whatever it takes to raise chickens the right way! Not that I have chickens, but I try to support local farmers whenever possible.
@mericanhomestead
No kidding on the high cost of purchasing worm treats at the pet store! I was just at PetSmart yesterday and I left them on the shelf. Thanks for the post! Friends that are moving to Guatemala (I know I know. I heard last Saturday's podcast. haha ; )) gave us some chickens this past Sunday, so this is very timely.
Great info! Thank, I will put this into place once I get going. I like this idea. You have most likely said this before but where are you located? I am wondering about the hard cold in the winter. Do you have to start over or will they make it? Thanks,
Thank you for the information about the mealworms. It is a great reminder that chicken feed does have to be bought from a store. At the end of your posts I've seen the homesteaders of steemit and gardeners of steemit. These are awesome designs! Are these sold as patches/stickers?
I love it! I have really taken up gardening the last 2 years and I have done much research on worm farming and worm castings! Worms are such amazing creatures. You can use them as chicken food, fish food, and plant fertilizer! You can't go wrong there!
Great info! I'd love not to buy any more feed for my chickens...beside saving, their ingredients are often not organic/natural.
This could not be more timely! I ordered worms and they arrive at the PO in two days. I ordered 1000. I guess some friends with chickens will be sharing in the bounty!
I like the stacking trays. Are special screen meshes available for the various growth stages?
Great post!
I've had worm bins for Eisenia Fetida (i.e. red wigglers or "composting" worms) but had never considered meal worms.
What most people don't understand about "frass" from insects (or castings from worms) is that it's not the poop itself that makes it so beneficial, it's the biological activity in the poop.
And meal worms are a great panfish bait too.
Upvoted, resteemed and continuing to follow (because I see in your comments that you actually spend the VP to acknowledge thoughtful comments, unlike some others).
Keep up the good work.
Hey you guys so Im new here but been following you since the first season of an american homestead on youtube. We started a channel too a few months ago and today have joined the steemit family. God Bless and take care
Once again Zach you get my upvote
Very useful post. We have a bunch of chickens and we usually take our food scraps to their food bucket and whatever they don't eat then goes to the compost which feeds the compost worms we then feed to the chickens. After watching your video we are going to look into getting a meal worm colony. We ought to since they are a meal and a worm all wrapped into one.