Worm City.....Compton, CA USA?

When I started keeping earthworms in my garage a few years back, my step-dad told me the biggest grower of worms was right down the street in Compton. I found this hard to believe as the methods of raising various earth worms, red wigglers specifically required a good amount of farm land and dirt and I know that Los Angeles has a strong agriculture heritage but I couldn't believe that a chunk of land in the middle of Los Angeles would make economic sense to raise earthworms. And as it turns out I was right...about it being earthworms.

Now mealworms, which aren't even worms, but rather the pupae stage of the Darkling Beetle is a different story completely. These little critters can be raised in the dark, stacked from floor to ceiling in rolling bins, which is exactly what 2 city blocks of not-so-prime land,(actually its a pretty rough part of town) is being used to do in Compton around 20 minutes from our house at Rainbow Mealworms.

This sounded like a dual-purpose field trip for Skye and me to take. We would be getting some worms, a great source of protien that our chickens would love and crazy over for a great price, Skye would get to see what a meal worm farm looks like, not what you think of when you think farm that's for sure and we these little critters would make for a lively addition to the upcoming Ecology 101-It's a Bug's World. Hey that's three things making it a multi-purpose trip.



In the heart of the 'hood' is a thriving mega-insectopolis.



It was a bit of a dingy place, but can't beat the prices.



This is one of dozens of buildings and that house the worms and worm-processing equipment, and shipping stuff and pretty much all you'd need to make raising beetles into a profitable venture.



One of the many hundreds of racks holding a few of the many more hundreds of bins used in meal worm production.




They were nice enough to show us the various varieties and also told us that the meal worm and the jumbo worm were the same species, but that the jumbo worm get treated with a hormone to make it around twice as big as its untreated brethren.

Hormone treated bugs
There seem to be hormones in everything these days. I recently found out that almost all tilapia, a cheap white fish being used in all sorts of food, are treated with hormones, the hormone drug 17alpha-methytestosterone to be exact, basically giving the young fish a sex change so they are all male and will grow bigger and fatter and at the same rate.

But I thought, wait don't we naturally have hormones in us? How bad would it be to add hormones? It depends on what hormones, do what levels, etc. etc. and the studies and results and evaluations from the results are flooding in amid a cacophony of controversy. I mean fattening up worms mostly to be fed to pet reptiles is one thing, bad enough, but chemical sex change to fish that then go directly to humans that seems a bit, (no don't use the pun) f---y?




They also come in two different colors.



It takes a lot to feed that many worms, or baby beetles more correctly.



The Beetles waiting to go on stage as it were.

It was an awesome class with much carnage, between the our cold blooded killer, Lief Erickson and the baby killing chickens, but the kids loved it and hopefully learned a thing or two. I learned more than I every thought I would about the Darkling Beetle and I've only just begun.