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| What
lies beneath:
Jack Brantley and his grandson John scratch the
surface of a worm bed, where castings have piled
up more than two feet deep in many places. |
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It had all the makings
of a B-grade horror movie. A bad storm hit South Georgia.
Power was knocked out for hours. And somewhere in the dark
moonless night a countless army of worms was making its escape.
“I shined
a flashlight into the hog pen we had converted into a worm
bed, and all four walls were completely pink,” recalls
Jack Brantley, owner of Bear Creek Worm Farm, about four hours
south of Atlanta.
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Tips and terms on worm farming |
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Vermiculture:
raising earthworms for resale, focusing on worm
growth, reproduction, and health
Vermicomposting:
the process of turning organic materials into
valuable worm castings
Castings:
worm excretion, rich in organic matter
and nutrients. Used as soil amendment or planting
medium.
Worms:
the most common raised for bait are red wigglers;
they also go by manure worms, dungworms, and fishing
worms. Average lifespan is one year. Can produce
900 eggs a year.
Tips
from Jack Brantley and Jason Governo
• Start out
small. There is a steep learning
curve to growing worms and the only way to learn
what works for your own conditions is by trial
and error.
• It takes
time to establish a worm selling market.
And with vermicomposting, producing good
castings takes more worms and more time than you
may think -- a year at minimum.
• Watch what
you use for feed and bedding. Chicken
manure, for example, contains salt and can burn
or dry out worms.
• Don’t
mix feed into soil unless your beds are deep and
worms can escape if soil gets too hot.
Mixing "hot" food into the beds will
increase heat whereas keeping it on the surface
prevents heat build-up.
• Learn to
make the proper beds. Worms will
eat from the surface down to about three or four
inches. Below that is all castings. Using sawdust
is good for making beds and adding aeration but
make sure pine sawdust is at least 10 years old.
Peat moss, if pre-soaked, also makes a good bed.
Just be aware, peat moss absorbs much more water
than you might expect.
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In the few hours it took to restore the spotlights that flood his three-acre
worm farm, years of investment were slipping down the drain.
Or more precisely -- down into Bear Creek.
“We had no way of getting the worms back into the beds,
so we took the beds to them,” says Brantley, explaining
why the maze of metal doors extends off into the woods where
he found hundreds of thousands of worms the next day.
For Georgia’s largest worm grower, the night of the
“walking” worms is more than just a good creep-out;
it’s one more cautionary tale for the vermiculture business,
an often oversimplified industry that has been hurt by hype
and shady dealings.
Growing worms can seem attractive to farmers, especially
organic farmers who can also benefit from the nutrient-rich
worm manure called castings. But as Brantley is quick to point
out, vermiculture is really just another live-animal feeding
operation – it’s just that most of the feeding
goes on out of sight.
“You have to work with worms just like you work with
baby calves or baby chicks,” says the 64-year-old South
Georgia native. “You can’t put them out there
and expect them to go on their own. In fact, you just about
have to think like a worm.”
Up until 10 years ago, Brantley was thinking like most traditional
farmers in this part of the state, raising cattle and hogs
to supplement his income as a president of Production Credit,
a local farm loan cooperative. Two successive heart attacks
convinced him he needed to slow down and change his lifestyle.
But worms came into the picture only by accident. While picking
up a pile of wet peanut hay one day in 1993, Brantley noticed
the abundant worms feeding on the surface. An avid fisherman
who had bought plenty of worms for bait, he suddenly saw an
opportunity.
“Lucy," he told his wife, “I think we should
start growing worms.”
Less fond of the little wigglers, Lucy didn’t share
his excitement. "Never in my life did I think I'd be
growing worms -- and certainly not at my age," she says,
recalling she had just recently become a grandmother.
Brantley tried picking the brains of established worm farmers
but found them guarded, as if afraid he would steal their
business. So he read all the worm books he could find, and
started out with about 100 pounds of Little Reds and Blue
Wigglers.
Starting small but
growing fast
The one bit of advice that proved invaluable was to start
small, experiment, and -- of course -- think like a worm.
Bear Creek Worm Farm began with four beds, 3 feet by 14 feet,
set inside the old hog pens.
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| Recycling
center: Brantley shoves spent grain
from a local brewery onto the beds once a week.
About 20,000 pounds of grain are delivered in a
semi-truck each week. |
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Brantley tried a variety of different feeds until he found
an optimal mix of free cotton gin trash (uncleaned cotton,
burrs, and lint left over from ginning) and spent brewery
grain. Protein-rich worm feed and chicken mash are added for
supplements. Maintaining the right temperature and moisture
levels, driving away pests, controlling disease, and harvesting
the worms left him little time for marketing.
With a single worm capable of laying 900 eggs a year, his
worms began multiplying exponentially. (He now estimates he
has 20,000 pounds of worms at any given time.) Soon, his worm
beds spilled out of the hog and chicken houses, eventually
covering about three acres.
In addition to the lights, Brantley installed sprinklers and
French drains, and covered all the beds with shade cloth to
keep out the hot Georgia sun. Damaged metal doors from a mobile
home manufacturer turned out to be a cheap but durable way
to contain the beds and lay down walkways for the wheelbarrows
of feed -- 20 tons a week -- that is shoveled on the beds.
By the end of his first year, Brantley had sold $13,000 worth
of worms to a regional bait distributor. His gross income
doubled the following year, and more than doubled again a
year later to $62,000.
“We started getting bigger and bigger, and I soon realized that a worm
farm could provide the amount of income we needed to carry
on,” he said.
With the help of two full-time employees, Brantley and his
wife are now able to keep a steady supply of worms to about
eight jobbers or middlemen in Georgia and Alabama. They also
ship worms across the country to small farmers and gardeners
wanting to raise worms themselves.
To keep down costs, Brantely harvests the worms by hand,
using a simple motor-driven grader that separates the worms
and castings. When everything is working right, the farm can
run about 1,000 pounds of worms a day, which sometimes happens
during the peak of the fishing season (February through June).
Castings prove harder
to move
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Top:
John Brantley, 11, helps Chao, one of Bear
Creek's two fulltime employees, get worms ready
for separating.
Bottom:
A simple worm grader, run by an electric
motor, separates the worms from the dirt. The worms
are then piled on a table. After a few minutes,
any leftover dirt rises to the surface, leaving
beneath it a mound of worms "clean as a bowl
of spaghetti." |
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Each year, Bear Creek's worm beds have not
only expanded outward, they have grown deeper with layers
of pure, odorless castings as dark as charcoal.
"My beds have never been changed in 10 years, so this
is the real thing," Brantley says as he scrapes away
a layer of worms and his hands disappear into the rich compost.
Now two feet deep in many places, this black gold is literally
the farm's long-term savings deposit. But as Brantley has
learned, finding a buyer for his castings has proved more
difficult than selling worms for bait.
Even a stockpile as large as his -- an estimated 2,500 tons
of the stuff -- hasn't been sufficient to win the interest
of big-box retailers, such as Wall Mart and Home Depot.
Jason Governo, a University of Georgia worm expert who has
a masters degree in composting, says there are several reasons
why castings have not become a hot commodity among large retailers.
“You don’t see castings in big stores because
they are expensive and most people don’t understand
their value compared to traditional fertilizers," he
explains. "The other problem is it takes a relatively
long time to make castings and so the supply is not there
to meet the demand.”
The most opportune markets for vermicomposting, he says,
are Ma and Pa nurseries, garden supply stores, greenhouses,
flower shops, and organic farmers. But vermicomposting is
still a relatively new practice in much of the United States.
“There is a lot of education needed before people can
see the value of castings," Governo adds.
And sometimes the value isn't there. Often what is sold as
pure castings is a mixture of added material, such as bark
and sawdust, Governo warns. To illustrate, he held up bag
of dry, brownish castings no bigger than half a quart, which
sold for $5 in an Atlanta garden store.
Spreading the word
through workshops
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| Worm
farmers take the bait, get lured and hooked by buy-back
scams
Five years ago, the University of Florida Cooperative
Extension Service warned farmers to be wary of
trumped-up claims that worms can be raised with
relatively little time, effort, and expense. Today,
many worm farmers across the country are wishing
they had listened more closely.
Numerous states have taken action against several
worm buy-back companies this summer, accusing
them of creating illegal Ponzi schemes that have
left hundreds of farmers with no market for their
worms.
“It’s not an easy situation to fix,”
says Jason Governo, a worm expert at the University
of Georgia’s Biological and Agricultural
Engineering Department. “A lot of people
lost a lot of money and a lot of worms.”
The buy-back companies sold what amounts to investment
contracts to farmers hoping to break into the
growing vermiculture businesses. For initial investments,
usually a $10,000 minimum, a nationwide network
of farmers purchased breeder worms with the promise
that the company would buy their offspring worms
back at a later date. State attorneys in several
states, including Oklahoma, Mississippi, and Kentucky,
allege that contracts were pyramid schemes dependent
on a constant supply of new contracts.
B&B Worm Farms of Meeker, OK, the nation’s
largest worm contractor, went bankrupt this summer,
following numerous violations in state laws. Other
buy-back worm companies under investigation include
Combined Resources Systems and Organic Systems
and Waste Solutions, both based in Nevada.
The collapse of the alleged pyramid schemes has
left farmers holding bags of worms with no place
to sell them. Governo recently spoke with one
Georgia farmer who had invested $70,000 in B&B
Worm Farm a week before it declared bankruptcy.
The worms the farmer bought were of such poor
quality he couldn't sell them for bait, Governo
added.
“For several years it looked like the industry
was really growing when in fact much of it was
this artificial demand,” he says.
Although vermiculture and vermicomposting offer
potential new markets for farmers, they take time
to develop and require a strong commitment, experts
say.
Buy-back arrangements can help new growers get
into the business without a large investment.
However, the University of Florida Cooperative
Extension Service suggests that before prospective
growers sign a contract that they first check
out a wholesaler’s reputation, beginning
with local Better Business Bureau, and its other
customers as well.
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One way of gaining access into the organic farming markets
is offering workshops to educate growers in the benefits of
castings as a soil amendment. At one recent workshop in the
Atlanta area, Brantley handed out free bags of castings along
with the results of research Governo had conducted on the
fertility of his soil. The research done at the University
of Georgia showed that tomato plants started in his castings
grew twice as large as those in potting soil.
After using Brantley's castings this spring, organic farmer
Skip Glover has become a convert: "The plants I put into
worm castings outgrew everything else by leaps and bounds,"
he says. "In fact, it threw off my timing and some plants
got too big for transplanting."
Castings now make up about 20% of the germination mix he
uses for tomatoes and peppers and also for transplanting.
One of the biggest benefits of castings is that they are filled
with microorganisms that make nutrients more available to
plants. Those microorganisms are then transplanted into the
field, inoculating the surrounding soil with healthy bacteria.
"The use of castings this way is so new there has been
little study,” says Glover. “But I see it as a
big step toward on-farm sustainability. If you have an on-site
worm bed you can producing castings at a low price and you
have your soil mix for plants right there.
Although Governo’s experiment with castings is impressive,
the real proof is whether faster growth translates into higher
fruit yield. Those studies are beginning this fall, he says.
After seeing Brantley’s castings and the Governo's
research results, master gardener Phil Edwards knew he had
to get his hands on the stuff. Recently he drove four hours
to Bear Creek Farm and loaded up his truck. Most of the castings
will be used in the gardens he oversees for the city's largest
garden club. But he also plans on bagging and selling them
at local farmers markets. (See box for tips and terms about
vermiculture.)
“I think there’s potentially a good market in
Atlanta, once people are educated about its benefits,”
says the retired urologist.
As he cultivates his castings market, Brantley hopes his
long-term investment in worm farming will pay of enough to
retire. But even a worm grower as experienced as Brantley
can never completely relax.
Last year, Bear Creek lost all its worms in a single month.
For reasons he is still trying to sort out, the worms crawled
to the surface of the beds and died. It happened not only
at his farm, but at his son's farm and other worm farms across
the Southeast. One worm expert surmised that an unusual drop
in barometric pressure pushed them out of the ground. It sounds
plausible, but only adds to the frustration of learning nothing
from the experience.
Fortunately, the millions of eggs left behind in the beds
gave the farm a rebirth. "I lost all my sales for 2002,'
Brantley says, "but I got all my worms back."
The hiatus in sales also gave Brantley more time to market
his castings. And at least that end of the worm business is
predictable; so far none of this castings have crawled off
or up and died.
Editor's note:
Jack Brantley doesn't have email or a phone message machine
but he's more than willing to share advice about worm farming.
He can be reached at 912-384-4743.
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