Steve Mendez

Hey Ryan,

There are plenty of potentially valuable wild/rare plants and animals that are just waiting for someone to develop the parameters for farming them and supplying a lucrative niche market.
The same goes for off the wall services that others haven't thought of or figured out how to do.

While working on your project/career/business/farm (whatever it may be) you'll need an income, possibly from a job you don't like and with people as you've described in your previous posts.
Suck it up and get busy. With study, hard work, dedication, and single mindedness towards a goal, you and your wife can overcome failure, disappointment, and setbacks to achieve a great outcome.
Try to stay positive and keep your future in mind.

You might try going out into your yard on a warm night with a UV flashlight. I know that scorpions and some centipedes really "light up" under a strong UV light.

I wonder if perhaps you are drowning the newly deposited eggs and newly hatched larvae. In my experience there is a fine line between feed too wet and feed just the right dampness for starting the maggots and for the flies to lay viable eggs. It doesn't take much to drown fly larvae, especially the small young ones.

Thanks for your interest Mallory.
Once we found our niche with the medical and educational markets we pretty much settled into that. We were as busy and as profitable as we wanted to be supplying an industry that is beneficial to human medicine and to science.
We conducted a lot of feed trials after we got the Bullfrogs to eat pellets. It took time and effort to work out the nutritional requirements for the adults as well as the larvae. The ingredients in the diets aren't so expensive as to make the pellets cost much more than some of the other feeds that the mill produces.
It is inefficient and expensive to raise an animal to feed to another animal that you are marketing.
We raised maggots year-round for five years to feed to the Bullfrogs while we tried dozens of ways to get them to eat pellets. By the time my brilliant wife came up with a method to get the Bullfrogs to eat pellets we were producing up to fifty Kgs of housefly (Mosca domestica) larvae a week in a separate larvarium.  After assembling her set-up and then seeing the Bullfrogs swallowing the pellets, I was astounded and started to hyperventilate and had sit on an upturned bucket while I calmed down. NO MORE MAGGOT FARMING!!! I rushed home to tell her about her success, there was a news story on the car radio about O.J. Simpson and a slow-speed chase on the freeway in LA.
I'll check out the link.

We had a Mormon Cricket (They're actually grasshoppers) population boom in the desert and mountains of our area this year. I didn't hear of any problems with them in agricultural areas.
On a side by side trip in the mountains on July 3rd we came upon bands of them crossing the trail in several places. They covered the ground for several hundred feet at each crossing. They pile up on the vehicle tracks to eat the ones that have been run over; thus getting run over themselves. It was a gooey mess when the third side by side brought up the rear. This picture is from July 2022.  

Being one legged means I have trouble standing and using a long handled shovel, spud fork, hoe, or rake. I find it much easier to sit on a tall 6 gallon fermenting bucket with a bucket seat to work in the garden or yard. This necessitates the use of short mostly D handled tools since I'm less than 5 feet tall on the bucket seat. Sitting makes it much easier to use my foot to help push a shovel or spud fork into the soil.

We have two plum trees that we brought back as seedlings from Utah 20 years ago.  They have been producing a good number of prune/plums for about 15 years. This year after a very mild  winter we had a very hard frost in April that killed the leaves and buds on our trees.  New leaves grew on the trees but they are kind of sparse and odd looking. Some of the leaves are curled. I took  a couple of photos of the underside of the leaves and they have quite the aphid infestation. This is the first year we've noticed anything like this.    

Set it up and try it out. Is the condition of the rope so bad that you can't practice with maybe a 5 gal. bucket of water? I've used set-ups with similar looking rope to lift a 200 lb deer. I did use leather gloves to handle the rope.

In the mid nineties when we first discovered how to spawn Bullfrogs; the dragonflies decimated our first couple of tadpole crops.  We could see the Bullfrogs in the spawning pens catch and eat dragonflies and thought "oh cool, another natural food source".  We failed to realize that the dragonflies were laying eggs of their own. The dragonfly nymphs which were hiding in the muck on the bottom of the pen ate a big portion of our tadpoles before we figured out what was going on. Straining the nymphs out of the muck and covering the pens with 1/4 inch plastic mesh solved the disappearing tadpole problem but another problem cropped up when we excluded the dragonflies from the pens. The nymphs had not just been eating  tadpoles but also mosquito larvae. We had to develop a skimmer apparatus to send the mosquito larvae down the drain to the settling pond until the tadpoles grew large enough to eat the mosquito larvae.
So yes I would say that dragonflies are definitely predacious.

There is a not quite abandoned 100 year old cabin in the mountains south of our town. It's still mostly weather proof inside and there is a table, a couple of chairs, a wood burning cook stove, and a cupboard stocked with some canned goods. I talked with a guy who claimed that he stayed overnight in the cabin a few years ago when his side by side broke down during a hunting trip. He waited there for a day until someone came along and gave him a ride back to town. There is no cell phone service in the area.
I took this pic last October during an Elk hunt.