The Fishing Bait Business

The fishing bait part of the business was born in the fall of 1988 when Dennis' father Lloyd, an avid fisherman, disgusted with the quality of maggots he could buy for fishing, started raising them in his backyard! Dennis, who had a full time job at the time, moved the experiment 30 miles North to Porthill, Idaho and began helping his dad. It was like a science project, except there wasn't any material on "How to raise a Maggot"!!

After a year of experimenting, Dennis was able to consistently raise a quality product that could be sold as fishing bait. Lloyd and his wife, Dorothy, at 77 years old, began peddling maggots to local fishing stores. In 1992, Dennis quit his job and with his wife Pam, started a wholesale business of selling the maggots to bait dealers throughout the United States and Canada.

The live bait business is a real narrow market that demands quality, and we provide a quality product. We ship fresh bait throughout the United States and Canada. Maggots/spikes are the preferred bait for many species of pan fish including Kokanee, a land-locked salmon, whitefish love them in the fall, and during the winter ice fishermen use them for perch.

The larvae are also used extensively in the pet food industry for birds and reptiles. We also get the occasional wild and crazy call from Hollywood "we need maggots or pupae for a movie". And most recently, we supplied the fly pupae for the controversial art exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York City.

FTR BSF DOC HOLLYWOOD M17

Registered Polled Hereford breeding stock arrived in the spring of 1992. Raising maggots follows the same schedule as milking cows... Not being interested in Holsteins and always having a fascination for Herefords and their temperament from Dennis' youth, Herefords were a logical addition. The seed stock business is much like the live bait business-"it's a real narrow market that demands quality and we provide a quality product". It also provides much needed therapy from the day to day demands of processing maggots!!

 We feel our bulls need to be of the quality to be used in our herd as well as adding genetic improvement for commercial cattlemen. "As a registered breeder, we need to keep the level of performance of our registered herd above that of the commercial herd, otherwise the commercial man will look elsewhere or to other breeds."

We entered the Research Seed Pollinating Market in the summer of 1993 with a phone call from Nick Molenaar, Crookham Company, Caldwell, Idaho, inquiring about using the Blue-Bottle Fly for pollinating! Within a short time we were successful in providing quality Blue Bottle fly pupae to seed research companies where they hatched into flies and began the work of pollinating. It has been a very rewarding experience working with plant breeders across the United States and Canada. We continue to strive to provide the best quality FLIES. We are willing to work with any type of plants and experiments.