Job Lot: The worm farmer

By TIM WATKIN

Anita Martin, 41, has been a worm farmer at Dairy Flat for two-and-a-half years. With husband Chris, she has two children, aged 15 months and three-and-a-half years.

She plans to grow their seed, flower and worm business once the children start school. The worms brought in about $5000 in the last year.


What made you want to get into farming worms?

We were looking for the best possible fertiliser and thought ... worms!

We bought about 10,000 worms and set up our own worm beds. We need to have large quantities of by-product for our flower growing.

We just put weed mats down on long-run iron, put surrounds around and put some bedding material [of old compost and peat moss] down for them and started feeding them.

How long does it take to raise a worm?

The life-cycle of a worm from egg to a worm that can produce eggs is about four months. They're not garden worms, they're known as tiger worms. They're more pinky-red with stripes and don't grow to huge sizes, perhaps 10-15cm. The compost worms also survive on old food, as opposed to the garden worms which live in paddocks and extract nutrition from the soil.

Who tends to buy your worms?

Usually people who are setting up a worm compost system, generally to get rid of their kitchen scraps. But there are also schools and other organisations that have started looking at recycling their scraps. The councils are very much promoting using worm composting, particularly in the domestic situation where they're starting to charge more to take away what they call green rubbish.

The Warehouse head office is also using one for all the leftovers from the cafeteria.

When we have to get an order out, we sell them by weight. We do a 250g pack ($25), guaranteed to have in excess of 1000 worms. People can use the compost in their garden or give it away to friends and family.

So you want people to "say it with worms?"

Well they do. Particularly over Christmas we were flat out with people buying bins and things as presents.

If you ever need more worms, do you just cut the ones you have in half?

Definitely not. That's an old fallacy. If you cut it in half you've killed it.

But they breed quite prolifically. Each worm can produce up to 1500 offspring a year. We expect that we've got upwards of 50-100,000 worms now.

And of course you can't tell the females from the males because they're hermaphrodites. They just need to rub up against each other. We could get into the technical details and say they exchange sperm.

How do you care for your stock?

We feed the worms probably only once a week. We have to check the water levels. We do that regularly because they need to have it moist.

Because we've got oblong beds we tend to feed at one end and then progress feeding up the bed over several weeks to a month, so that at any stage we roughly know where the worms are at. Once we get to the top end we know that the bottom end's going to be pretty much free of worms and we can put it on the garden.

Because we've got commercial worms we've been growing food for them. We're growing pumpkins and watermelons and things like that because they like the food when it's really quite soft and mushy.

One of the questions we get asked a lot is how you tell which end is which. But really, we just need to look at which way they're moving because they don't tend to go backwards.