Worm Man's Worm Farm

One of the members of our forum asked some great questions about what caused the mealworm shortage and what mealworm farms were doing to stop future shortages.  I answer his questions below and I wanted to share those with you.  Please feel free to go to our forum and weigh in or weigh in right here. 

Farming is not always foolproof.  We have lived through a red worm shortage and a superworm shortage that were both nation-wide.  Europe was hit by a cricket disease that almost wiped out their cricket breeding industry.  What you don’t often see is that many farmers of worms, crickets and other products communicate and buy from each other.  This interconnectedness even while openly competing for business can lead to national shortages when demand rises or when one of the big boys(or girls) gets hit hard with one thing or another.

Now on to my answers.

I think that this is a great question.  We were hit by the shortage also.  I think that there were several issues that caused the shortage in mealworms.

1.  Many farms buy from other farms when they run short.  So if my demand spikes and out paces my capacity I will buy from another farm to fill our orders.  Some say that low prices coupled with a spike in orders caused growers to look for more from other farms.  Those farms could not compete and many dipped in to their breeding stocks and it caused  long term effects.
This was our issue at Wormman.com and we are still having an issue with large mealworms running out often.

2.  Some say that the some farms were using growth hormone to grow their large mealworms.  Beetles that come from such mealworms are sterile so farmers growing large worms with the hope of breeding them were hit when they got very little from their beetles.  I think that this is very likely because it is very hard to grow large mealworms to a very large size without growth hormone.  We only use growth hormone to grow our Giant Mealworms.

3.  Some farms were saying that they had an issue with the food supply for their mealworms.  They say it was tainted with insecticide or something.  This is not plausible because we all get our food from different places.

4.  Some say it was a mealworm disease.  That’s not what hit us.  What hit us was increasing demand with a decreasing price which also increased demand more.  Then when we started to run short of mealworms and didn’t want to dip into our breeders we could not buy enough to meet the demand.  The cycle got worse until everyone was out.

Many measures have been put in place. Many farms have grown their mealworm facilities to prevent this in the future.  We have doubled our mealworm breeding space.  The long term effect will be a reduced price in the future as more people start farms to meet demand. That should benefit consumers of mealworms.