No, I dont eat bugs as a general practice.....
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Maggot farmer produces 10 million a year for bait
Saturday, November 19, 2005 By Bob Gwizdz
ORLEANS -- Like many farmers, Herb Seibelman gets started with his chores at the crack of dawn. Unlike many farmers, he harvests his crop daily, putting it in cold storage until the market for it develops, as it will, in the months ahead.
Freshness isn't a concern. Kept at temperatures in the mid to upper 30s, Seibelman's product will last almost indefinitely, he says. Long enough, at any rate, to provide seed for next fall's crop.
But Seibelman, 67, doesn't produce fruit or vegetables, grain or livestock. And although his crop is used as a feed-product, it won't be used in any other agricultural activity, but rather as an important part of a pastime.
Seibelman raises maggots, commonly known in ice-fishing parlance as "spikes," or, perhaps a bit more technically accurate, fly larva. Not just any fly larva, Seibelman says; he produces larva from large blow flies, bigger than your run-of-the-mill house flies, so they produce bigger than your run-of-the-mill maggots.
"I try to produce a good bait," says Seibelman, who has been growing fly larva -- he calls them "bugs" -- commercially since the early 1970s.
The key, Seibelman said, is providing them plenty of food. So Seibelman maintains a massive feed pile -- made up primarily of road-killed deer carcasses and what's left of deer after meat processors get through with them.
"The longer you can keep feed to them, the bigger they get," Seibelman said. "They just gorge themselves, basically."
Big is the operative word. Seibelman likes his spikes big enough to offer fish a meal. After he's harvested his crop, he sorts it with a strainer. Any "bugs" that fall through the screen are rejected.
"I hate to see somebody out fishing without good bait," Seibelman said. "You want a bait that works. There's nothing worse than fishing with something when you want to be fishing with something else."
In a given year, Seibelman will raise some 10 million spikes. He gets only a fraction of a fraction of a penny apiece for them -- he sells them to distributors in lots of 25,000 -- so volume is a key to his business.
"Ten years ago, I had eight million of them and I ran out," Seibelman said. "So every year now, I put up 10 million."
It's all about timing, Seibelman says. Start too early in the year, he says, and the local flies will take over your feed pile. He needs cool weather -- "colder weather seems to produce a bigger bug," he says -- but not so cold that the flies freeze.
"If it gets too cold, there's no flies," he said. "If there's no flies, there's no eggs, there's no bugs."
This fall has been a difficult one for Seibelman, who says on his best day ever, he produced about a million and a half bugs. The unusually warm autumn not only set back his planting season -- Seibelman begins by letting about 100,000 of last year's larvae loose in the feed pile -- but it's made it hard for him to come up with the deer parts he needs for feed.
Deer hunting has been a little slow so far this year because of the warm weather, he said.
Seibelman stores his bugs in a walk-in cooler in large aluminum wash tubs. He keeps somewhere between 75,000 to 85,000 in a tub full of saw dust. Too many in a tub and they start to die.
"I don't like dead ones in my buckets," he said. "Nothing lives in its own dead. Not even maggots.
"You take a box of something that's half dead and the whole box will soon be."
Although he didn't start raising spikes until the 1970s, Seibelman says he's been in the bait business his whole life, "since I was a kid on a bicycle," he said. "I started out picking cow flop grubs, catching crickets, cutting corn borers.
"In those days, people went fishing for something to do. Today, people are so busy they've got to take a vacation to go fishing. They've got to make a point of it."
Seibelman graduated from catching to growing bait, first with wax worms, which are the larva of the bee moth and probably the top ice-fishing bait in this part of the country.
"That became a 24-hour job, seven days a week," he said. "Wax worms are a lot of work. I bailed out of it."
But about the same time, he started buying raw furs and found he had a lot of carcasses to dispose of. So he decided to put them to work -- in a spike garden.
The season for spikes is short in this part of the country, though the bait is starting to catch on elsewhere during soft-water season.
"It's becoming more popular as a summer bait," Seibelman said. "Wisconsin and Indiana use them more. In Pennsylvania, they're starting to use them for trout fishing.
"Michigan is kind of slow. In Michigan, everybody uses nightcrawlers. They think they have to have a half-pound bait to catch bluegills."
