Gage Fielding gets ready to cast his baited hook in to Wellsville Reservoir on Tuesday April 25, 2025.
WELLSVILLE – Austin Richards of Wellsville is an avid fisherman. He goes a couple of times a week to drown a worm. He’ll go with his nephew, he goes with his son and he goes by himself.
Recently, he was fishing with his nephew Gage Fielding at Wellsville Reservoir. They were using a classic bait of nightcrawlers.
Whether he knows it or not, Richards is taking part in a quality-of-life activity that contributes over $1.1 billion to the state’s economy and adds over 7,562 jobs to Utah’s workforce. That includes $626 million that an estimated 578,265 anglers spent while fishing in the state.
Fishing in the U.S. also supports more than 800,000 jobs and generates $38 billion in wages and $16 billion in federal, state and local taxes.
Nationally, the American Sportfisherman Association reported U.S. anglers spend approximately $50 billion per year in retail sales associated with their sport and nightcrawler sales contribute to that total.
The nightcrawlers Richards uses are a bait almost every fisherman has used at one time or another. As the snow and ice clears off the water fishermen are getting ready to take advantage of the long-awaited spring and summer sunshine. That is when nightcrawlers will be in demand.
Locally, Snake River Bait distributes nightcrawlers to over 20 locations in Cache Valley alone. Snake River Bait also distributes the wiggly things to locations in Box Elder County and Rich counties. They have 260 retail locations where their bait is delivered.
“I think this is good time of year to talk about bait and fishing,” Bruce Hendrix, founder of Snake River Bait, said. “I think nightcrawlers is a pretty tough bait to beat when it comes to fishing.”
Some convenience stores sell a dozen worms for $4 a dozen depending on where they are bought. Snake River Bait comes to Cache Valley twice a month.
“Our story is unique,” he said. “A friend of my dad’s asked us boys if we would help gather earthworms (those worms were not nightcrawlers, we sell nightcrawlers now), and at the time the family was farming.”
Three years later they were producing a million worms a year. In Fallon, worms were just a small part of their business.
“At one time we had a large fishing tackle business that extended to the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada’s south to Susanville, California 30 to 40 miles away,” Hendrix said. “I wanted to do my own thing and the night nightcrawler business owner wanted to sell. I bought it in 2002.”
He put his degree in Agricultural Economics from Brigham Young University to use and began to turn the night crawler business into a profitable enterprise.
He raised seven children while operating his nightcrawler business and finally lured his son Jeff away from JBS in Iowa where he was a hog buyer to return and take over the business in Idaho.
“None of the other kids wanted to do it and I thought it was a good opportunity to do my own thing,” Jeff said. “It is better than working for a big company.”
Snake River Bait has four guys with three vans that do all the delivery and when fishing is at its peak there probably delivering thousands of nightcrawlers across the region.
Jeff also has an Ag Economics degree, only his is from BYU Idaho.
“I would say it is a family business and I take a lot of pride doing something my father and grandfather did,” he said. “I love doing it and happy we decided to do take it on.”