I wouldn't be concerned about mold. What I would be concerned about is how badly it will smell while it is breaking down. I wouldn't feed it to the worms.

Don't feed worms glass, metal, or plastic.
Anything else, they will eat.
Just bury stinky stuff and let the worms feast.
Worms do not have noses.

Dog food has a fairly high proportion of meat. I would only feed in judicious amounts. Depending on the size of the bag, that means you could have it a while.

However, if it is a high dollar food, the store will probably take it back. These foods tend have a lot few preservatives and can go rancid more easily (like human food), especially past the expiration date. Which may explain the smell.

Your local animal shelter would probably be delighted to get the food if it hasn't gone bad.

Hi hoodat! A fellow by the name of D Brian Paley can tell you a tale about dog food in a bin I 'll link it. Its a long read but has some good info at the site. Start with part 2 It Happened Like This...

Here is a link that might be useful: The Burrow

Whatever happened to D Brian Paley?
He sure left me with a lot of unanswered questions.

lkittle , thanks for that link. A very amusing blog. I guess I'd better go easy on that dog food if I don't want worm fricasee.

Hey hoodat; Yea Paley was a good writer, it's too bad he moved on so quickly. I did do that experiment with the small containers. Its trickey and you must use the exact same materials he used other wise your results will be different. Funny thing though I can duplicate his results by neglect of my bin and letting the castings get very dense in the bottem of my taller bins I have some wild worms right now that are in about 7 inches of dense wet castings that are breeding and they are about 3/4 inch long the cocoons are tiny from them. When I put them into larger surroundings they get to normal size of 2-2.5 " go figure. It happens every time I harvest and devide the squirm.

lkittle: Thanks for the link to Paley's blog. I read it through and like others am disappointed he moved on. Guess he is one of those that gets very involved in a hobby, takes it a ways then drops it for new interests.

I was interested to note he used lumbricus rubellus instead of one of the eisenia worms. Have you used these worms, yourself? I did a search and got conflicting information (like we usually do).

I am considering trying to get a few to see how I like them.
Of course I am also thinking of getting some African nightcrawlers as well, but as of right now I do not know where I will keep them. I am actively trying to build up my population of EH's.

Hi pjames; The fact he used the Lr species is really not the relevent part. All composting worms will react the same way to the environment they are in when its very dense the soil particals close togather and little wriggling space will produce smaller worms..

The worms that actually tunnel by ingesting the soil and extracting neutreients from it grow bigger for some reason. Perhaps science will unlock the reason for this someday. I can think of some right off. The common garden variety and Lts are larger worms due to a couple of reasons. They live longer do to subterrianen habitat so they get larger with age. The other is they need more muscle mass to work through the soil. The garden worms (tunnels horizontally)come to the surface to excreat middens. Lts can live 12 years or so. I think thats why they grow so big. They also enlarge their tunnel as long as they have mates and food to pull down into the tunnel. They only move if they loose one of thoes items.

One thing I enjoy about this forum is the sense of humor of most posters. I guess when you mess with something as cantankerous as worms you need one.