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Here is a publication from Scripps showing B. anthracis can be grown in simple medium and induced to sporulate moderately efficiently. The yields achieved in this article are about 10 fold lower than usually achieved in routine bacterial cultures (a hundred million per milliliter instead of a billion), but it should be noted that these cultures were carried out with antibiotic resistance conferring plasmids present (which in my mind, nobody should be doing with B. anthracis, geez!) and antibiotics in the growth medium, so yields might be better without that going on.
Also, this paper destroys the assertion I saw earlier, I think in one of the UT threads, that growth of B. anthracis requires the use of live feeder cells. In this paper, they used LB broth, which is the most used bacterial medium around.
Given the yields in this paper, a loner would need to grow about twenty to fify liters of culture to harvest the material in the Daschle and Leahy letters. With standard billion per milliliter yields, then only a few liters of culture would be needed.
Link: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1595385
(Although we share a last name, I don't know and don't believe I'm related to the first author of this publication.)
