Our New Vermicomposting System
Red Wigglers Doing the Heavy Lifting!
The execution of regenerative agriculture is a process. I have seen many a folks build big dreams in their minds about what their regenerative operation should look like. Then, depression and anxiety pours over them when they realize how far their current garden or grazing operation is from being perfect. The path to eating an elephant is one bite at a time, as is the path to building healthy soil. The most recent bite we took at our farm campus was building a vermicompost bin. A vermicompost bin is a place for our newest livestock, red wigglers, to be fed organic matter and produce excellent quality compost for us to harvest. This is a solution to the reliance we had in the past on utilizing packaged potting soil for seed starts in our garden.
To produce the amount of worm casting dense, quality compost needed to fit our operation, we went with the Red Wiggler variety of composting worm. We found that the Red Wiggler best fit our garden’s context of eating depth, temperature range, and preferred food. While there are many ways to set up a healthy environment for composting worms, I decided to build a “flow through” system rather than other systems you may find online. Flow through vermicompost bins allow for harvest without disturbing the worms who are currently eating, and with the minimal break up of the good fungal mycelium that we want in our growing medium.
I followed the poor boy method in this building project. The system was made completely out of repurposed items that we had laying around our farm campus. The result isn’t necessarily pretty, but it is functional. The bins full carrying capacity is 12 pounds of Red Wigglers. Instead of purchasing all of those, we decided to only buy one third of that. Composting worm populations double every 90 days under ideal temperatures with excess food. However, they will adjust reproduction once carrying capacity has been reached to not eat themselves out of home. We are taking advantage of this by only purchasing the minimum number of worms we estimated we needed to fulfill our own demands for the spring. By next year, when the composting worms are at full carrying capacity, we will be producing much more vermicompost than we need for our minimal needs to spread in other areas of our garden, give to other gardeners, or sell to our community.
This vermicomposting system is a wonderful example of a holon enterprise which turns waste into a useful product. Our worms received a food supply of solarized manure, wood shavings, and paper shreds to build their initial home environment. Once they eat through this, we will be feeding them with weed scraps produced from the garden, paper shreds produced from the office, and kitchen waste produced from our break room. Best practice here is to feed them every three days, while also ensuring their home is moist (not flooded, just moist). Harvesting the compost only takes 5 minutes with the flow through system. So, we get a large amount of benefit to our soil through a healthy growing medium and vermicompost tea at a very low “chore cost”- an estimated average of 30 minutes a week.
I am proud of the vermicomposting system we created here, and cannot wait to see how much it benefits our soil next year. It’s a fantastic project to work on in the off season to bring benefit to soil health for the very next season. While it took some effort to research and set up, it was rewarding to see the accomplishment of one more small step to achieve the regenerative garden dream we have at USARAAI.
Drew Wilson, USARAAI Farm Campus Manager
