Keep in mind that most figures people spout out about worm breeding are best case situations. If worms bread that fast all the time no matter what, we would be up to our chins in worms.

Also, I have not read much that talks about harvesting large numbers of worms on a daily basis. Most people seem more interested in how much food waste the worms can eat on a daily basis. If you are going to have an operation big enough to harvest 1/2 lb of worms daily you will probably need big (like 4' by 8' worm beds) and several of them at least. You will also probably need to start with a large amount of worms or you will need to be very patient until your worm population increases. Oh, and you will need a good food source for those worms as they don't tend to breed as much when food is scarce.

To find out exact answers about how many worms you can regularly harvest from a system you might try talking to a company that makes supplying worms to people their business. Here is a link to one company I know of.

Here is a link that might be useful: our vital earth

I would suggest starting a bin with 2 pounds of worms. And as the worms population increase split to more bins. That way you'll know what type of worm population you will need to sustain a one half pound per day yield.

I would suggest that you don't feed thousands of dollars worth of worms to hundreds of dollars worth of fish. How much are the catfish worth and how many pounds of worms @ $20.00 a pound are you going to feed them? Set the fish free and sell the worms if you want to raise some!

I have several beds of worms. In one 5 ftx20 ft bed, I have 2-4 feet of material. Over the course of several months, I process the whole bed. I dig out some of the old material, and add all fresh feed (mostly garden waste, kitchen scraps and lots of paper and cardboard). I make no particular effort to balance the feed: what is at hand is what goes into the beds. In this bed, I estimate I have around 2 pounds of worms/square ft, so we have 200 pounds of worms. My guess, based on the fact that I take finished material out of this bed for planting or enriching other areas regularly, is that this size bed could easily sustain a loss of half a pound a day of worms. Note that I have to feed quite a bit of raw materials to these worms. In fact, the reason I have the big bed is to process lots of waste organics, not to sell any worms. I do periodically give folks a five gallon bucket of the material, full of worms, to start their own beds. Since I live in a cold winter climate, the big bed is located in a greenhouse. The greenhouse also provides quite a bit of the waste organics in the winter.

Renais