Nutrient-rich worm waste boosts family farm

www.agrinews-pubs.com
Tom Doran
2010-06-14

ASHKUM, Ill. – Earthworms are best known for fish bait, bird food and improving soil quality, but they also can provide a source of income for a unique business.

While looking for more diversification for his farming operation, Lynn Wilken saw an ad for vermiculture in 2001 and sought out some information, marking the beginning of what has now grown to producing 20 tons per month of worm manure castings.

The castings are bagged and sold as microbial-rich fertilizer from coast to coast.

The University of Illinois recently hosted this year’s first sustainable agriculture tour at Wilken Worm Farm. The business slowly grew over the years since Wilken started it as a hobby before undergoing large advancements in the past few years with the help of his son, A.J.

“About three or four years ago, A.J., who had always worked in there, got real interested. We saw it as a great opportunity for him to learn more of the business,” Lynn Wilken said. “He looked at some things, made some improvements. It’s been a great experience for him.”

“It was an area that wasn’t real profitable at the time, there was a lot of labor, and we didn’t have the time and the labor,” A.J. added. “I was in grade school at the time, and I’d come home at night and work out there. It gave me an opportunity to start running my own business, and at the time the volume of it wasn’t as large as it is today.

“My interest grew in it, and I wanted to start improving things here and there and take it to the next level. I’d like to see it go even farther from here on out.”

A.J. took over the vermiculture operation as an FFA project and later received state honors for his efforts.

“The way I started in it was the business needed more attention and I was able to come in and take over the management position and improve it from there,” he said.

“We’ve really increased it the last two to three years, and now he’s graduated from college and we’re looking to work on our marketing end,” the father said.

“We feel like we have the production end of it down, and now we’re working on marketing it a little more direct and to make it a little more profitable.”

The process begins by filling five-gallon buckets with a mixture of screened and pulverized peat and a feed grain mixture. About 250 African night crawlers are placed in each bucket.

The combination of peat, grain and number of worms supplies food for 10 to 12 days for per bucket. They remain in the bucket another two days – allowing time for eggs to be produced.

The night crawlers are kept in a temperature-controlled building that maintains a range of 70 to 90 degrees. The humidity is also regulated, particularly during the winter.

The worms are harvested at the end of the feeding cycle and placed into a fresh bucket of feed and bedding for another 14 days, and the process begins again.

Harvest consists of a rotary screen machine that allows the castings to fall through and keeps the worms rolling down the drum and exiting at the bottom. The eggs are also separated during the process.

This process is repeated over and over as long as the worms are healthy and abundant. The egg material is used to start new hatches that keep supplying the business with new worms. This material is watered and fed, then put into an incubator room where they are left to hatch.

“We currently have between 400,000 and 500,000 worms in production, producing around 20 tons per month of castings,” A.J. Wilken said.

Customers currently include landscapers, lawn care businesses, gardeners, greenhouses and individuals using the material on houseplants.

“Our product is extremely pure and high quality when compared to other castings, mostly because of the controlled process and screening that takes place,” the son said.

Castings are available in 2,000-pound bags, as well as 1, 10 and 20-pound bags.

“We are working on ways to build the business by selling to landscapers, golf courses, retail outlets and direct sales to individuals,” Lynn Wilken said..

“We’re hoping to expand the worm production itself. We plan on raising mealworms to sell to pet shops and for use in birdseed. We’re also looking into raising red worms to sell to bait shops.”

It’s been a learning process for the family and required a lot of research and trial and error.

“It’s not something that you can just go up to someone with a lot of knowledge and ask them,” A.J. Wilken said. “Some things that you don’t think about initially cause problems. Now that we’ve been in it 9 years, the last 2 years have been thriving years. I still have to sometimes do research.

“You look at ways to improve it, such as my hatch and how I can better utilize the outcome of that to produce more worms in a shorter amount of time. “But it’s been a learning curve and it is starting to pay off. It’s also been exciting to get your hands dirty in the meantime and learn at the same time.”

This is just one of the activities at the highly diversified Wilken farm.

“My brother and I run a soybean seed processing plant under the name MWS Seeds,” Lynn Wilken said. “We raise about 30 varieties of soybeans on our own farm and contract with other farms for additional acres.”

Birdseed also provides income for the Wilken farm.

“We bring in semi truck loads of sunflower seed, millet, safflower and various other grains to mix with corn from our own farm to produce several birdseed mixes that attract different birds like finches, cardinals and other songbirds,” Wilken said.

They also offer ornamental corn and other fall products, and Lynn is also getting into the soy candles business.

“We’re a very eager and ambitious family,” A.J. Wilken said. “We do all these other things aside from farming. I enjoy the farming end of things, but then to have a business to work in at night when we’re not able to get into the field is also nice to keep busy, too. We strive to diversify”

He looks forward to focusing more on the marketing end, now that the production end is running smoothly.

“The next thing is to start making connections with people,” he said. “I know some people who are interest but they already have another source of castings.

“We’re trying to get our names out there with our website and encourage people to tour our facilities and educate them. That’s what builds businesses. I know there are a lot of people around here who are interested in the product, they just don’t know where to go to get it.

“We’re here all of the time and we’d like to maybe put a display in the office so if someone stops for some conventional seed bags, they’ll also pick up their castings and some of the other end products that we’re starting to make here. Who knows, maybe in the next year or two we’ll have to add on a little retail store.”

Karen Moore, U of I Extension director of the Ford-Iroquois Unit, commends the Wilken family for their unique combination of vermiculture, birdseed sales, the family seed operation and row-crop production because it demonstrates compatibility through seasonal building usage.

“As we move into 21 st century agriculture, it is important to think outside the box and move forward with new ideas that will assure profitability in the ag industry, as well as provide for the needs of consumers in our state, nation and internationally,” she said.

“This family business is an excellent example of how a seemingly small FFA project has grown into a viable entity in the community.”


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