Ups and downs of worm growing
keep Georgia farmer on his toes
Worm farming can be lucrative, says Jack Brantley of Bear Creek Worm Farm … but it’s like any other live-animal feeding operation. It takes experience, skill and patience. He recommends starting small.

By Skip Connett

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.

Tips and terms on worm farming 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.

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.

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.

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

Top:  Grandson John, 11, helps Chao, one of Bear Creek's two fulltime employees, get worms ready for separating with a simple grader that removes the castings. Bottom:  A few minutes after the worms are piled up on a table, the castings rise to the surface, leaving a mound of worms "clean as a bowl of spagetti."

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

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.

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.