About

59 year old retired Cricket Farmer…

Yes, I said cricket farmer. One of the best ideas my father ever had. The original plan was to supply Bait shops, but early on I realized the pet food market was a bigger and year round.

Our success was due in part to the appearance of the Australian bearded dragon in the early 1990’s. Geckos, anoles, tarantulas and many other critters also enjoyed our product. At one time we served over 150 pet shops and zoological gardens in Southern Indiana. I gained experience with many aspects of farming, chickens, rabbits, cattle, horses, goat, etc.

Our family also had a very successful truck farming operation with acres & acres of tomatoes, sweet corn, cantaloupes, watermelons, lettuce, and beans. Basically anything that would grow in our region and soil type.

My dad’s day job was that of a locksmith. A trade he began teaching me at about 8 years of age. That career peaked when I landed a job as a safe & vault technician with a large national banking chain. It was a good job but most of my family, grandparents, aunts, uncles were self employed, which was always the goal for me.

In 2008 our cricket farm began to show symptoms of a virus that was nearly world wide and by 2010 we could no longer produce them in the numbers required to continue operation by 2012 we had sold the farm and retired to a much smaller place that was more in line with our needs.

A few years later in an attempt to over come anxiety created when a person goes from working 16 hours a day to nearly nothing. I began to clean up my woodland property left devastated by an ice storm. ATV trails seemed to be a good option, that would allow friends and family to come visit and recreate. It turned out to be a better idea than I had originally thought.

One day while constructing an ATV bridge out of the broken and destroyed cedar trees. I dropped my hammer into the small creek ravine under the bridge, it was at the point I noticed strange looking marks on some of the slabs of rock in the creek bed. That was an Eureka moment that began my education into trace fossils.

After some research we determined that trilobites were responsible for the tracks we were finding. Since then, an entire ancient Eco system has come into focus, tracks from worms, sea scorpions, shrimp, crayfish, zoophilous, chondrites and many others, some yet to be identified, along with many plant fossils. All of which we are now ready to share to some degree, by showing the excitement of finding new pieces and making specimens available at a reasonable price. As well as sharing what we have learned about an alien world that existed right here as long as 350 million years ago.

Thank you for stopping by, I hope you learn a little something about this long forgotten ancient world.

Barry
The Trilobite Tracker