does anyone have suggestions for starting a worm farm?

Back in the mid 1970's there was a worm farm craze that many people invested in. They found that when you sell the worms, they have to be freeze dried. It takes thousands of freeze dried worms to make a pound of worms.

Make sure you have a market for your worms before investing money.

You will need a shelter over your worm bins to protect the bins from the weather. The sun will heat the soil and kill the worms, the rain will drown the worms.

Horse manure makes the best worm food. Luckily it is free. Most stables have to pay to get rid of it, so they are happy when you take it away.

Make a long cylinder out of mesh screen. The mesh should be large enough for manure, baby worms and eggs to fall through, but small enough grown worms will not fall through.
Raise one end of the mesh cylinder. Scoop manure out of the bins and dump it into the raised end of the cylinder, rotate the cylinder until all of the manure has dropped through the mesh, and the grown worms have dropped out the lower end into a bucket.

Scoop up the manure, baby worms and worm eggs under the cylinder and return them to the bin.

Selling worm casting (worm poo) to local gardeners is also part of the worm business..

Type "Vermiculture" into the Yahoo search engine and take it from there.

Everyone is assuming that you are doing this to sell the worms - presumably as bait. Is this true? I have a "worm bin" but I do not sell my worms. I use them for gardening / compost purposes. In such a situation, the worms in question must be "redworms," they must be kept indoors in a place that does not go below freezing (such as my barn) and you must use the correct media - not "dirt." I feed them kitchen scraps - any vegetable matter left over, never meat, and they provide me with "worm castings" which are a rich fertilizer.

There has been copious amounts written about the subject and there are many gardening retail sites which sell redworms.

Here is a step-by-step description:
http://hellopoetry.com/poem/1628/nobody-loses-all-the-time/

get some worms
get some dirt
sell that s h i t