Vermicomposting on Nature's Roots Farm

When the farm first started in 2020, I was looking for a reliable, local source of compost to help boost my farm's soil health. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I could not find anything that would supply us on our scale. This led me to take some time to research everything I could about composting. My conclusion after months of reading, watching videos, and listening to podcasts was to start with vermicompost. 

Vermicomposting is the process of using earthworms (specifically composting worms) to break down organic matter and turn it into a biologically rich soil amendment. I emphasize composting worms because you shouldn’t just find any worm to use in your vermicomposting bin. There are literally over a million different species of worms but there are only a handful of composting worms. We specifically use Red Wiggler (Eisenia fetida) because they consume more and have a higher cold tolerance compared to the other species. Once we purchased our first pound of worms, we housed them in a 20-gallon tote and fed them the food scraps from our kitchen. I learned a lot about how to take care of the worms with this first bin, but I also figured out that one small tote wasn’t going to feed all the farm's fertility needs. 

I decided that we need a much larger bin, so I took one of the old feed bunks that my grandpa used for cattle and turned it into a 16 foot long 3 foot wide continuous flow through (CFT) vermicomposting bin. We then had a bigger worm bin, but I had a new problem at hand. How am I going to feed this growing population of worms? That is when we thought we should start collecting food scraps from our community. At first, I took home moldy produce from my job at a grocery store and in the summer I took all the garden scraps from the farm. After doing this for awhile, I determined that I want to make a bigger impact on the community around me by collecting food scraps from households. This was not being done in our area at the time so in 2022 we set up our compost subscription program. Through this program we provide our customers with a clean 5-gallon compost bucket that is delivered directly to their front door. We then pick up their full compost buckets on a weekly/bi-weekly basis. I wanted to make it easy for our community to start composting and for us to get more food for our worms. 

As you can see, we have slowly grown our vermicomposting operation to be able to divert more food scraps into fertile soil that feeds our farm and grows more food instead of ending up in a landfill. We also work with a mushroom farmer to collect all their spent mushroom blocks and all our harvested microgreen trays go right to the worms. Today, our compost is made up of our garden debris, several buckets of food scraps from our compost subscribers, and occasionally excess organic waste from the Red River Harvest Cooperative. 

We currently use worm castings or finished compost throughout our farm. Since we have implemented castings in our seed starting mix, we have seen a massive increase in seed germination and a shortening of germination time. Our lettuce used to take about a week to germinate but now, with the worm castings, our lettuce germinates in 72 hours! We incorporate the worm castings into every planting bed on the farm, including; the planting holes of our new perennials and into the topsoil of our existing plants. My hope going forward is to supply all of the farm's fertility needs and be able to provide vermicompost to our local community gardeners and farmers.

As of this year, we have built a second 16 foot CFT worm bin, expanded the compost subscription service to the whole Fargo/Moorhead area, increased our ability to receive food scraps, and built a large insulated room to keep the worms nice and warm in our subzero temperatures. Our goal by the end of the year is to build two more CFT bins, effectively doubling our composting abilities and increasing our compost subscribers to 25 members. We hope to continue to expand our composting capacity to meet the needs of our farm and to service the community with our shared desire to stop sending food scraps to waste in the landfills.