One Harm to Your Worm Farm: Predators

This maybe annoying to accept, when you're a worm farm keeper, but the animals you intend to supply with your worms may just be the ones you need to shield your worms from. You built your worm farm essentially to rake in some profits. So simply sitting by doing nothing, letting those animals eat away your produce, just won't do. You want to keep coming with a sure and steady level of produce to sell to people and establishments needing those worms.

These animals, when fed and kept on the same farm as the worms in your worm farm, maybe affecting your worm produce in ways you hardly notice or would like to control. Various birds love to eat worms, so do foxes, snakes, toads, hedgehogs, slugs, leaches, beetles, and many parasites. So that's the first worry when protecting your worms.

Another worry here concerns what you feed your worms. These would be the manure you probably get from livestock farms. You use those manure to feed your worms. The problem lies in the fact that those livestock ingest some form of medication, which, if you don't know about, may negatively affect your worms. Those medications may not always be cleanly digested by livestock, and so the residue stacks up in the manure, which then goes to your worms.

Another problem with manure feeds include cluster flies and mites which prey on your worms. So you'd better be in the know about which livestock farms you can trust when getting manure as worm-feeds.

Related to this is when children have access to your worm farms. Not only may their inquisitive hands mishandle the worms, these children may also be affected by the left-over medication in the manure you feed your worms with. You'd best be putting up large signs to keep children away from your worm farm.

As for your worm bins, you need good drainage, so that the water gets replaced. Stale water tends to be contaminated over time, essentially harming your worms. You'd also need to be careful about drainage material you use. Some use shreds of cardboard, but some of these cardboards may have been contaminated by pesticides, which will in turn come into contact with your worms.

Another cost-affecting factor is which other predator consume the feeds you give to your worms. Worms tend to eat a lot, and if the feed supply allotted to them gets consumed by some other predator, then the worms may not be eating as much as they should, or as you expect them. They'd suffer and may be leave their designated worm beds. Even if the predator is not after the worms themselves, the effect is the same: you may suffer a reduction in your worm produce. One specific problem here is the presence of raccoons on your farm, because these critters tend to find their way into hidden containers and can open up latches.

For those who have birds on the same farm when you have your worms, there's no problem with these birds so long as you can find ways to keep them uninterested in your worms. So you might as well find ways to feed these birds in areas away from your worms, to prevent them from being curious and in the end finding your worms and eating them.

The last kind of predators neither consume worm feeds nor live on your farm. If your worm farm is found in or is located in a densely populated area, thieves and trespassers or nosy neighbors. So you will have to be sure your doors are not that easy to lock-pick, and that your fences discourage passers-by from simply jumping over them so they could snatch some wriggleys from your worm farm.