He’s Looking for Larvae in All the Right Places : Pet food: As a maggot farmer, Skip Cockerum is more Lord of the Flies than Old MacDonald. If you come see him, leave the swatter at home.

“You’ll have to excuse the mess,” Skip Cockerum says as he climbs the block of steps into the fly-infested trailer home. The small room inside is dark and filled with the sharp scent of fresh animal waste.

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Cockerum opens one of several little doors on a soiled plywood cabinet, and fans his hand in front of it to keep flies from getting out. The shelf inside supports a row of paper-lined, fish ‘n’ chips baskets, each heaped with fly-covered cow manure.

Cockerum extracts one of the baskets and picks through the manure with his fingers to examine his latest cash crop. He can’t find anything at the moment, but says that within a few days the dung will be teeming with his precious maggots.

Cockerum makes a living cultivating the very thing most people would rather kill: houseflies.

He grows the pests as food for exotic birds, fish, reptiles and rodents. He sells them as maggots and mature flies; sometimes live, sometimes dead and dried; and often as a key ingredient in such concoctions as “Peanutbugger,” a trademark bird-food loaf that looks just the way it sounds.

Cockerum says his flies and fly products are distributed to more than 100 pet stores nationwide. This year, he predicts he will gross, so to speak, $175,000.

“The business is a lot bigger inside than it appears from the outside,” boasts Cockerum, sweeping his hand over his grassy property 12 miles south of Tillamook on U.S. Highway 101. The property, set amid Tillamook County’s dairy farms, is no pristine campus of laboratories, but rather a collection of used mobile homes, which Cockerum uses for fly pens, manufacturing shops, office space and storage.

Cockerum didn’t always want to be maggot farmer. A tall, slender man with a blond mustache and goatee, and gold studs in both ears, Cockerum explains how the bug hit him 20 years ago at Willamette University in Salem.

It was August and Cockerum, who was seven years into a double major of art history and studio painting, was splitting rent with another student in a rambling, old house off campus.

“My roommate wasn’t very interested in cleaning,” says Cockerum, now seated behind a cluttered desk in his office, blowing a drag off his Benson and Hedges into a cloud of little flies. “He was much more interested in bluegrass music, translating Russian poetry and chasing women.”

So Cockerum, tired of cleaning house for two, let dirty dishes accumulate in the sink and bags of garbage mount in the kitchen.

A month later, when Cockerum reached his limit, he took out the kitchen wastebasket and dumped it into the 40-gallon can in the alley. He checked the bottom of the wastebasket to see if it was empty, and saw a clump of rotten cat food covered with maggots.

Cockerum says it may have been the joint he smoked an hour earlier, because he took an unusual interest in the creatures and dumped them on the sidewalk for a closer look-see.

But where most would have left it at that, Cockerum went straight to the library and learned all he could about his new curiosity.

“I found that maggots have 50% more protein than beef, they grow on garbage and manure, and you can raise them in a week,” Cockerum says. “I said, ‘My God, I’m looking at gold.’ ”

With that discovery, Cockerum ran to the hardware store and got to work on what would eventually become Cockerum Oregon Insects Corp., the first pet food company, he claims, to begin as a bug farm rather than a granary.

The raising method Cockerum has developed seems fairly simple, though he says it involves a few trade secrets.

It starts out in the breeding pen, the wooden cabinet where thousands of flies buzz around, mate and lay eggs in manure-heaped baskets.

“They have food, water and sex,” Cockerum says of the custom-designed accommodations. “What more could you want?”

When the dung is sufficiently impregnated with eggs, Cockerum transfers it to a rearing tub, a square, plastic container of the type restaurants use to bus dishes.

Cockerum lines up the rearing tubs on a metal cart, and covers them with a plastic tarp. He won’t say what the tarp’s for or why the manure in some of the tubs is covered with sawdust.

Sometimes he raises the creatures for 20 days, until they mature into flies. But the obvious difficulties of harvesting fleet, winged insects makes them too expensive for most customers, he says.

So most of the time, Cockerum harvests the creatures earlier, in the larva stage.

He separates the larva, commonly known as maggots, from the dung--again, by a secret, proprietary process--and dumps them into wooden boxes about 30 inches square and a foot deep.

Some of the maggots are shipped to customers live by overnight mail. The others suffer death by blow-dryer, actually, a big house fan, and end up as a crumbly, brown substance resembling Grape-Nuts.

A five-pound, shrink-wrapped bag of dried maggots fetches Cockerum $150. But the same maggots can be mixed with other ingredients and turned into $1,000 worth of pet food.

Cockerum’s products include Oregon Suet Block, a mixture of fat, beef kidneys, and bugs that bears a dangerous semblance to pepper jack cheese; Peanutbugger, a similar product that substitutes the fat with peanut butter; and Soya Musca domestica, a whitish powder that includes soya flour and a nutrient-rich algae.

Cockerum sells the products out of his own office in Beaver and through a national distributor, which markets them in more than 100 pet stores around the country.

Breeders of exotic birds, many of which crave a diet rich in live food, comprise a big part of Cockerum’s market.

Ben Cooper, a San Diego bird hobbyist, says he feeds his rare finches live maggots from Cockerum’s farm twice a day. The birds won’t raise young if they don’t get live food, Cooper said, and Cockerum raises the only variety of maggots small enough for their beaks.

“I think he’s known all over the U.S.,” Cooper says of Cockerum. “His larvae are very good.”

The pioneering nature of the business has made it difficult to make money on a consistent basis, Cockerum admits. And since he recently moved from the Port of Tillamook to his own property in Beaver, he’s had trouble winning over the neighbors.

For a pending land-use hearing before the Tillamook County commissioners, Cockerum says he’s going to trade his torn blue jeans and chamois shirt for a pressed, pin-stripe suit and a new pair of wingtips. But as someone who enjoys being the fly in the ointment, Cockerum says he’s also going to trade the gold studs for a pair of pearl earrings.

“I could live a more presentable, middle-class lifestyle,” Cockerum says, flashing a smile. “But I’m more interested in doing something interesting than keeping up with the Joneses.”