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This information is directly from Aquatic Foods.
Here is a write up of some of the things we do in a kind of outline. I hope this kind of gives you an idea of how serious I am about providing the best, cleanest and safest worms available. Thanks for your time.
Dan
The Farm:
- We have 3 large ponds: two 2-acres and one 3-acre
- All three are aerated and covered to keep the ducks and all birds out, every one eats blackworms.
- We pump in water from the river and a deep well on the property, this way we can control the temperature during winter and summer months. The river intake is screened to prevent anything from being brought into the ponds. When the water is discharged into the ponds it is run through a small micron screened box. Remember everything eats blackworms.
Raising the worms:
- We feed them a very high protein pellet salmon feed during the winter and a lesser protein feed during the summer. This stops "hot" spots in the pond.
- The worms are 4 - 6 weeks old before we harvest them. During that 4 - 6 weeks we feed daily and rake them daily.
- When we harvest, it's plain old hard-on-the-back work. We bucket them and the mud they are in out of the pond, bucket by bucket.
Cleaning:
- They are brought indoors and placed in our cleaners. Without getting into this much I can say the cleaning uses extreme heat. They are in this process 2 - 4 hours.
- They are then removed and placed in holding tanks. Here they are kept 7 - 10 days so that they can be purged to the max. They are fed nothing. For shipping it is very important that they have no feed in them. The stress of shipping will make them discharge their waste in the shipping boxes.
Holding and Shipping Facility:
- The worms are then brought to my warehouse in town. There they are kept in holding tanks in a 2500 square foot cold box in a 40 - 45° Fahrenheit chilled water closed system. There they are held for 36 - 48 hours for shipping. Remember, purging is very important for shipping.
It is my hope that this adds to the body of information we have on blackworms as a food for Discus.
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