Turning manure into cash

You can pay your horse feed bill with manure – or to be exact, with worm castings made by composting manure with red wriggler worms. There is no catch or mystery, you add the worms to the manure pile, nature does the work and gardeners will beat a path to your door to load their pick-ups with what they call, “black gold”. Every morning in every horse barn, someone is shovelling a wheelbarrow-load of manure and sodden bedding out of every stall. Behind the barn, a mountain of manure grows along with the smell and the flies. This all represents time, money and environmental worries; it doesn’t have to be that way. The worms speed up a natural process and will, over a few months, convert the manure into nutrient-rich castings, which retail for up $5 for a two-litre container and the worms for $45 per lb. The income from the sale of worms and castings is comparable to the cost of the feed that went into producing the manure. It is worth taking a glimpse into the fecund world of the red wriggler. Red wiggler worms eat their own weight in organic matter every day, their population doubles each month and the nutrient-rich castings contain essential minerals in a form readily available to plants. Compared to regular topsoil, worm castings have five times more nitrogen, seven times more phosphorus and eleven times more potash. Unlike their earthworm cousins, who live in the soil, red wrigglers are litter dwellers and prefer leaf mold and the underside of rotten logs. They play an intregal role, along with fungi and microbes, in converting dead plants into humus, the organic component of soil. In nature, the time scale for this process is measured in centuries, in the barnyard it takes weeks because the manure pile is nirvana for red wrigglers. Their requirements are simple: moisture, air, a temperature between 12 – 25 degrees C and food. Manure and spoiled alfalfa bales are an ideal food source because the carbon: nitrogen ratio is approximately 25: 1. They are hermaphrodite, or both male and female, mature in about four weeks and produce two to six offspring every month. The size of the manure pile provides the heat and turning the pile occasionally insures aeration. Commercial operations can speed the composting process down to a few weeks, however, it is cheaper and simpler to let nature work at her own pace and just turn the pile once or twice; by the following year the ‘black gold’ will be ready to use. Worm castings have many applications – a top dressing for paddocks, gardening or as a profitable sideline. Both the worms and the castings are in high demand by organic gardeners. “My focus is to sell worms so that people can make their own compost”, says Cathy Nesbitt of Cathyscrawlers of Bradford, Ontario. Along with providing worms and worm castings, the ten-year-old business has a strong educational component. “Composting is how individuals can make a difference in tackling the big problems we all face, like, climate change, food security and overflowing landfills”, she added. Composting manure with worms is a natural for horse people; tired paddocks can be restored to lush pasture and gardens blossom. There is also the pleasant thought that no matter how your day goes, behind the barn, you have thousands of the little darlings giving the manure heap the Midas touch.