Worm your way to wealth

MANILA, Philippines - Earthworms may be lowliest of the low to our eyes, but they play a vital role in Mother Nature’s way of things aside from just feeding the early bird. Visit the Quezon Memorial Circle Vermicomposting Facility at the grounds of the towering marble monument and you’ll see how.

It is an earthworm farm. There, hundreds of thousands of earthworms are grown in beds of decaying leaves, grass and branches collected throughout the park. They are kept in 32 rectangular pens made of hollow blocks over a concrete foundation. Over each bed is a net nailed to a wooden frame to prevent birds, frogs and other predators from turning the worms into a smorgasbord.

How it works is so simple. The worms eat and their excrement – worm castings – makes excellent fertilizer. When they are done with the eat-all-you-can buffet, you transfer the worms to a new bed. Everything left in the old bed, which resemble dirt with the color of dark chocolate, is used for fertilizer. The process takes two to three months, depending on how many worms you have eating their merry way.

The vermicompost facility is a partnership between the Quezon City government and Earthworm Sanctuary, a vermiculture farm run by Tony and Beth de Castro, a husband-and-wife team.

It all began over five years ago when Tony heard about vermiculture and bought a kilo of earthworms – numbering about a thousand wrigglers – from the Department of Science and Technology. A committed environmentalist, Tony was initially interested in growing his own organic vegetables and minimizing his garbage output.

However, the earthworms – each breeding about seven a day – just kept multiplying. Tony and his wife were then asking neighbors to send them their yard and kitchen waste to feed the worms. But the worms kept breeding.

It didn’t take long before the de Castros were having problems on where to put the worms. They were also selling excess vegetables, organic compost and earthworms to people who were interested in making organic compost. “So, what started as a backyard project eventually became a whole organic farm producing vegetables and herbs in Tanay, Rizal. “So the business just grew out of our interest in vermiculture,” says Tony.

Tony and Beth have been going around the country, preaching vermiculture as one solution to the country’s ailing agriculture and garbage disposal problems. They hold seminars at Quezon Memorial Circle and La Mesa Eco Park daily.

Those who want to start out into vermiculture can purchase “starter kits” from Earthworm Sanctuary for P3,000. It consists of a kilo of worms, an instruction manual, two worm bins and a protective net.

Tony and Beth’s vision is for town, cities, subdivisions and even individual homes to adopt vermiculture as a garbage disposal solution. A number of schools, parks, churches, villages have adopted vermicomposting.

In their arrangement with the Quezon City government, no money is exchanged. The de Castros provide the technical know-how while the local government provides the land, manpower and everything else.

“About 60 percent of trash going to landfills is biodegradable,” says Tony. That means savings in sanitation costs for the QC government. The facility also acts as a show-and-tell demonstration on how it’s done and how it works.

Eathworm Sanctuary (www.earthwormsanctuary.multiply.com) also encourages farmers to go into worm farming. Citing their own experience, Tony and Beth swear that vegetables grown organically have been proven to be more resistant to pests and disease, and they taste better. Worm castings are rich in nutrients. Compared to ordinary soil, they contain five times more nitrogen, seven times more phosphorus, 11 times more potassium, three times more magnesium, and one-and-one-half times more calcium.

“To get the full nutritional value of one banana, you have to eat three bananas if it’s non-organically grown,” explains Beth, a professor at the nearby University of the Philippines.

Switching to organic can bring down farm costs. The price for a 50-kilo sack vermicompost is about P800 while a 50-kilo sack of traditional fertilizer is about P2,000. “If the farmer switches to organic fertilizer, he doesn’t have to depend on imported fertilizer,” Tony says. “Imagine how organic fertilizer can bring down food prices if every farm across the Philippines goes organic.”

Currently, organic farm produce costs higher because the demand is high and supply is low. But, according to Tony, prices will go down once supply catches up.

What makes the de Castros so passionate about vermiculture is the simplicity of learning from Mother Nature. As long as the earthworms have food, they will happily work for you continuously.

Tony points to the prevalent practice of burning leaves and branches when cleaning the yard. “You can feed leaves and weeds to worms. Instead, farmers burn them and then they buy fertilizer when they can make their own fertilizer. It’s crazy.”

No wonder the Chinese character for “earthworms” translates to “angels of the earth”.