Efficient

As soon as it warms up outside (in a month or two,) I will have my worm/insect systems up and running. I will create a website to demonstrate how to build and run one yourself. The reason that worms are even considered, is that they can be feed things that are abundant in most areas, need no light, and breed quickly. I believe that your worries about feeding the worms are exaggerated. Worms eat almost anything organic; leaves, cardboard, etc. Unless a firestorm burns up everything around you, there will be plenty of decaying organic matter around you. The worms can be used as food for chickens or fish. Based on early calculations (using chickens, fish would use half) 64 cubic feet of worm bin space is all that is needed to feed each person (with the addition of 23 pounds of organic matter for worm food per week). Any part of the fish or chicken that is not consumed can be feed back to the worms along with all fecal matter. The biggest obstacle is feeding and producing the quantity of worms you'll need, and for this we must use the most efficient means possible. It is possible to maintain your worms in a Minaturized State, then grow them out to full size in 10-15 days for useage. While small, they eat very little.

Offered by Michael.

My original concerns about food for the worms stemmed from the fact that I had read many articles and some book on raising worms, which all seemed to agree that grass and leaves could be used as bedding, but food either in the form of table scarps or manure was also needed. But it seems indeed that the worms can live off of just cardboard or compost as evidenced in the excellent article Raise 100 pounds of Worms in One Room; this guy even grew red worms in soil! So my worries were misplaced. Worms will be a very good base for an ecosystem. Now I have two questions (I will run my own experiments but this will save me time):

1. must the yard waste be composting before adding it the the worm bin and if so for how long?
2. and raising fish solely on worms seems to me like it adds an extra layer to the ecosystem introducing more inefficiencies and it is a lot more work. Why this extra level?

The method of shrinking the worms down does give us an easy and effective way to take lots of worms into the aftertime with us.

Offered by Pythag.