When stepped on, the worm curls up. That is a clever thing to do. Thus it reduces its chances of being stepped on again. In the language of morality: humility.
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Twilight of the Idols, 1889
AFTER SPENDING SO MUCH time with earthworms, I have developed an appreciation for their essential qualities. Worms are ruminators; they sift through whatever surrounds them, turn it over, explore it, move through it. They are deliberate creatures, in no great hurry, but always in motion, twisting and burrowing, shrinking and contracting, and eating. They spend their lives in a kind of active meditation, working through the detritus in which they live, the bits of leaves and grass and particles of soil. For a being with such a simple brain, a worm seems, in this way, almost thoughtful.
Functionally, worms really do only one thing: they digest. They live in their food source and their own waste is not repulsive to them; in fact, the bacteria in earthworm castings help to build the kind of soil community where they can thrive. I suppose any kind of digestion is transformative: any food source that is eaten becomes something else. Any environment, any single life is in a continuous state of change. This is just more obvious when you pay attention to earthworms. Their work may seem unspectacular at first. They don’t chirp or sing, they don’t gallop or soar, they don’t hunt or make tools or write books. But they do something just as powerful: they consume, they transform, they change the earth.
Digestive problems plagued Darwin for most of his life. He took to his bed for weeks at a time, unable to write or keep up with his correspondence. His illness often worsened when a manuscript was due to the publisher, or during one of Emma’s ten childbirths. In fact, even when Emma was confined to bed during the last month of a pregnancy, she still looked after her husband. When a child became ill, Darwin often required a nurse as well. The man who sailed around the world on the Beagle, the great scientist, the father of the theory of evolution, spent most of his life in a sick and fretful state.
He suffered from bouts of vomiting, boils, dizziness, and headaches. He availed himself of every cure that Victorian medicine had to offer him: small doses of arsenic to settle the pain brought on by inflamed lesions; batteries that gave an electrical shock to an upset stomach, ointments and tonics of all kinds, and a water cure that involved alternating cold-water baths and sweats and required him to wear a cold, wet compress on his stomach most of the day. He kept a diary of his illness, assigning codes to each symptom. In 1852, seven years before the publication of Origin of Species, he recorded an equal number of sick and healthy days. Is it any surprise, then, that Darwin so valued the vigor and the digestive powers of earthworms?
Psychotherapist Adam Phillips pointed out that Darwin, like the worms, had a great deal of material to digest, and his work, like the work of the worms, would change the face of the earth. Exploring the psychological implications of Darwin’s work, Phillips wrote, “When it came to earthworms, suffice it to say, their digestion worked. Indeed digestion was their work, and it had the most remarkable consequences. Work and digestion—and the links between them—were to dominate Darwin’s life. For the idea of work as digestion, and digestion as the body’s forced and unforced labour, Darwin turned to the worms.”
Earthworms, then, may have been the perfect subject for him. They were built only for eating, and they carried out their task flawlessly. They seemed to suffer no illness and rarely faced any obstacle that could keep them from their work. This may explain why Darwin heaped so much praise upon them. In choosing the earthworm for the subject of his final book, he revealed something about the moral universe in which he lived. Phillips wrote, “It was to be part of Darwin’s undogmatic shifting of the hierarchies to see earthworms—typically associated with death and corruption and lowliness—as maintaining the earth, sustaining its fertility. The poor, he would imply, had already inherited the earth. . . .” Through his exploration of this overlooked creature, Phillips points out, Darwin wrote his own version of The Making of the English Working Class. The great scientist discovered more about earthworms than merely their habits and habitats; he revealed their noblest qualities.
Noble? A worm? I’ve watched earthworms squirm around in my garbage for years. I suppose I can understand why people associate them with filth; after all, they are so often found writhing beneath the muck and trash. Anything that’s rotten will attract them, but they are not rotten themselves. Anything dead will have a worm writhing through it eventually, but worms are powerfully alive. I have come to understand, like Darwin had, that earthworms are not destroyers, but redeemers. They move through waste and decay in their contemplative way, sifting, turning it into something else, something that is better.
SOMETIMES PEOPLE ASK me why I’ve never started a worm farm. After keeping them for seven years, I guess I’ve got the knack of it by now. Maybe I could expand my operation, build a few wooden bins in the backyard, and make a little money selling worms to people who want to get started with their own bins. Maybe I could even offer to pick up kitchen waste from a few restaurants in town, charging them less than they pay in disposal fees and selling the castings for a premium price at nurseries. Once, in Pasadena, I saw a quart-sized carton of worm castings selling for fifteen dollars. That sounds like easy money to me. So why not?
For one thing, I’d run into the same problem selling worm castings that I would if I were to go into business selling chocolate or tawny port: I’d keep all the inventory for myself. I buy compost by the truckload for my annual mulching of the flower beds. I have to buy it because my worms only produce a few cubic feet of castings each season. If I had enough worms to generate truckloads of castings, my farm would still have only one customer: me.
Also, worm farming has a bad reputation as a get-rich-quick scheme. Over the years, people have heard about the great potential in earthworm castings and hoped to make a fast buck. After all, you can get started in worm farming with a fairly small investment, and they don’t take up nearly as much space as other get-rich-quick farm schemes like llamas or chinchillas. Maybe that’s why so many people have staked their fortune on a box of worms. Out here in California, it seems as if everyone over the age of sixty had an uncle or a neighbor who tried to raise them for a while. Worms and rabbits were a popular combination: both reproduce rapidly, promising more profit, and if the rabbit cages are suspended above the worm beds, the worms will eat the droppings along with any alfalfa pellets the rabbits miss. But most of these stories end the same way. The worms don’t reproduce as fast as promised, or they dry up in the heat. Sometimes the company that promised to buy back the worms at an agreed-upon price won’t live up to its half of the bargain. Eventually the enterprise fails and the uncle or the neighbor moves on to something else.
In fact, the story of the uncle who tried worm farming is so ubiquitous that e.e. cummings even wrote a poem about it. In his poem “nobody loses all the time,” he laments the failures of Uncle Sol, who tries to grow vegetables but fails because the chickens eat them all. Then he becomes a chicken farmer, but the skunks eat the chickens. He becomes a skunk farmer but the skunks all catch a cold and die. The poem ends with the family gathered around Uncle Sol’s casket. He redeems himself in death, finding success as a farmer as he is lowered into his grave:
i remember we all cried like the Missouri
when my Uncle Sol’s coffin lurched because
somebody pressed a button
(and down went
my Uncle
Sol
and started a worm farm)
But the real reason I’ve never become a worm farmer is that even after all this time, I get a little nervous about the idea of keeping them in such mass quantities. The more I know about what they’re capable of, the more I wonder whether it is such a good idea for them to outnumber me a million to one right here at home. Worms are fairly simple creatures, but they can be difficult to manage in large numbers. I heard a story about a couple who had gotten into worm farming and awoke one morning to find that their hundred thousand worms had walked out in the middle of the night. The worms were clustered in balls all over the walls of their barn, and there was no way to round them up. It was as if they’d gone on strike to protest the conditions in their bedding. Without moisture or food, they would probably die there. It’s a ghastly image, all those dead worms stuck to the walls.
Water is the thing that most often makes worms go on the move like this, as if they are following some evolutionary signal to move away from the sea and seek dry land. Sometimes they will walk out in a rainstorm and collect on the sidewalks to get away from the high humidity in their burrows. There have been reports of worms climbing to the rooftops of buildings in Burma. These walkouts are often fatal—if the sun comes out, a worm will get cooked—but if things get bad enough where they are, they’ll take their chances anyway. There’s nothing you can do about it; maybe that’s what worries me. I like to think that I’m in charge of my worms, but am I?
I’ve come home from vacation once or twice to find that the lid of my bin has blown off in a storm. At first my heart skips a beat: what if the worms staged a walkout while I was gone? But then I realize that they would not get far on the wood plank surface of my porch. If they left, I’d know it, because the porch would be covered with dead worms. But so far, they have never walked out on me, even when the lid was removed. No matter what shape the worm bin is in, when I lift the layer of newspaper, underneath I see them all, loyal and content. The lid is usually in the backyard. I retrieve it and place it gingerly on top of the bin, as if I am pulling a blanket over the worms to tuck them in for the night. Underneath all my worry about walkouts and the hidden agenda of worms on the move, I do have quite a bit of affection for the creatures. That’s another reason why I’ve never started a worm farm. I hate the thought of packing them up and sending them off to live with strangers, even for good money.
So I stick to my small-scale bin. A few of my friends have them now, too. We compare notes, rummage through each other’s bins, and discuss feeding strategies and reproductive rates. I hardly think of a bin as an unusual thing to have on the back porch, but in fact, the idea is fairly new. Thirty years ago, there were very few guidebooks and no commercially manufactured worm bins. All that changed when Mary Appelhof, one of the best-known worm composting advocates, published a brochure on the subject and sold it to anyone who would send a quarter and a self-addressed, stamped envelope. By 1982, that brochure had evolved into Worms Eat My Garbage, a book that is now the classic how-to guide for home worm composters.
Appelhof told me that she had no qualms about the idea of millions of worms going to work on garbage. “When I got started thirty years ago, that’s what I envisioned—huge piles of garbage and huge quantities of worms. I didn’t have the wherewithal to make that happen, but I did know how to get worm composting going one household at a time. So that’s what I did.
“I used to say that one ton of worms could eat one ton of garbage. I was always thinking big like that. Then I found out that Seattle had distributed four thousand worm bins. I did some figuring and realized that worked out to ten tons of garbage going into worm bins. That’s when I realized—it’s happening! It just isn’t happening the way I originally thought it would.”
Ten tons of garbage. It is staggering to think of the amount of waste that people produce. Californians dispose of about thirty-eight million tons of waste per year. I did the math; it works out to seventy-two tons per minute. I can’t get my mind around a figure like that; I can’t imagine what that much waste would look like. I think about the handfuls of kitchen scraps I toss to my worms. That’s fine, but what about the tons of waste going into the landfill every minute? Couldn’t some of that garbage be fed to earthworms too?
I TRY TO PICTURE a wooden bin full of rotting food and earthworms behind an upscale Manhattan restaurant. The kitchen staff would have to separate vegetable scraps from the meat, the grease, and anything that’s been seasoned or covered in sauce. Someone would have to carry the food out to the alley and feed it to the worms every night, shining a flashlight down into the bin to make sure there were no problems with mold or excessive dampness. They would have to be protected from the cold in winter and the heat in summer. Most important of all, they would have to be locked up to be kept safe from mischief in the middle of the night. And when the bin was full of castings, someone would have to take the time to harvest them, separate out the worms, and—what? Push them down Madison Avenue in a wheelbarrow?
It’s not a likely scenario. But hauling food waste to the landfill gets expensive, not just for restaurants, but for breweries, food processing plants, and cafeterias. Even dairy and livestock farms produce a waste product—manure—that has to be disposed of somehow. But it takes a large-scale facility to make worm composting work in a way that is clean, efficient, and—especially if the sight of millions of worms writhing around in garbage makes you squeamish—out of sight. In the last decade or so, a few companies have started to build massive new worm composters that could handle waste on a grand scale.
Unlike a home bin, these larger models, sometimes called “continuous flow reactors,” are highly automated. Many of them look like large metal bins—picture a series of garbage Dumpsters all joined together—with machinery underneath and at either end to apply food and remove castings. A tray powered by a conveyor belt moves along the top and deposits food at the surface, hydraulic scrapers remove castings from underneath the machines, and thermostats monitor temperature constantly, activating fans, sprinklers, or air conditioners whenever the feedstock gets too hot. These systems, which can cost up to $100,000 to build, are usually housed in simple modular warehouses. They are more like machines than ordinary bins, and the earthworms are like industrial workers, each doing one small job on a massive factory line.
I talked to Scott Subler, who worked with Clive Edwards at Ohio State University for seven years before he founded his own worm compost company. “We were seeing some incredible results with our vermicompost trials at OSU,” he told me. “I got so interested in the waste management side of worm composting that I decided to leave academia and form this company. Because I was in Ohio at the time, I could tell that manure management on farms was turning into a major pollution issue. I could have set up a paper waste or a food waste facility, but I really wanted to see what we could do about animal waste.”
Subler’s not the only one concerned about animal waste. The Environmental Protection Agency has stepped in with increasingly strict regulations governing the management and treatment of animal manure. The agency estimated that five hundred million tons of animal manure are produced by the major dairy and livestock farms every year. That manure can be spread on farmland as fertilizer, or simply heaped onto empty fields as a way to get rid of it. However, the EPA has found that runoff from large animal operations can pollute drinking water supplies with unhealthy levels of nitrate and dangerous microorganisms like cryptosporidium. It can add too much ammonia to streams, rivers, and lakes; contribute to blooms of algae; and deplete the level of oxygen in the water, which can cause fish to die off. Even air quality is affected: these large operations emit a tremendous amount of methane gas and release ozone and greenhouse gases that the can reduce crop yields, make plants more vulnerable to disease, and cause health problems for people working around the farm.
“It’s going to cost more and more for farmers to haul manure away,” Subler told me. “To clean this waste up to the point where it’s not harmful will require something that’s almost the equivalent of a sewage treatment plant. It’s a big issue. That’s why I decided to focus on dairy manure.”
His facility uses one of the high-tech continuous flow reactors. It is housed inside a metal warehouse, where staff can control the temperature and constantly monitor the manure coming in and the castings going out. The facility is so clean, the machinery so streamlined, that it’s possible to forget that inside the reactor, thousands and thousands of earthworms are eating their way through the feedstock, just as they do on a much smaller scale in my own backyard bin.
“We can process 250 to 350 tons of manure per year,” Subler said. “We pre-compost the stuff to kill weed seeds and pathogens, then run it through the reactor. The worms love it and you already know it makes a good soil amendment. And the best part is, we built this reactor with off-the-shelf materials. All the moving parts are the same ones they use for dairy and manure handling equipment already. It’s easier for farmers to get parts and make repairs that way.”
Once the equipment is set up, the next question is what to do with the castings. Subler has decided to focus his efforts on creating a consistent worm casting product for home gardeners. Consistency is a major issue for anyone in the compost business; in fact, Clive Edwards is working with a U.S. Department of Agriculture committee charged with setting nationwide quality standards for compost. Edwards and Subler both agree that consumers should know what they’re buying when it comes to vermicompost in particular. The quality can vary widely depending on what the worms were fed and the extent to which they ate their way through the foodstock. (When worms are fed composted cow manure, for example, it may be difficult to tell by looking whether the finished product has been completely digested.) As Edwards and his colleagues start to publish their findings about the benefits of vermicompost in agriculture, they want to make sure that farmers and gardeners understand the importance of a consistent product. “We also don’t want manufacturers adding fertilizers to the compost unless it’s labeled properly,” Edwards said. “People think that if a little bit of something is good, a lot must be better. But that’s not always the case.”
So Subler sells bagged earthworm castings, a liquid “casting tea,” and tea bags that gardeners can use to brew their own liquid fertilizer. He’s even gone on QVC to sell his product and spread the message about the benefits of worm castings. When I spoke to him, our conversation focused not on boutique products for gardeners, but on the broader implications of earthworm farming and animal waste. After all, fertilizer isn’t cheap, and it’s no secret that the chemicals farmers apply to their crops are costly, hazardous to the environment, and increasingly unpopular with the public. There are just under one billion acres of farmland in the United States. What if all that livestock manure—five hundred million tons per year of it—could be digested by worms and applied to nearby corn, wheat, or soybean fields? Sure, that only works out to a half-ton of castings per acre per year, which falls short of the two to four tons per acre that Edwards is considering in his research. But what if composted food and paper waste were added to the mix? Is it too idealistic to imagine that worms could take care of all kinds of agricultural, industrial, and municipal waste and turn it into a fertilizer that farmers could use in place of chemicals?
“It’s a real policy issue, putting it all together like that,” Subler said. “The inputs are not a problem. You’re right, there’s animal waste, food waste, all kinds of organic material for the worms to eat. It’s the output that’s a problem. To create a market for worm castings, the farmers have to be encouraged to use vermicompost. The supply has to be consistent and available when they need it. As a concept, it makes sense for everybody to implement it—regulators, business people, farmers, the general public—but it’s still hard to make it go. There are maybe a dozen people in the country working on this. But give it another ten years. It’ll catch on.”
FROM THE WORMS’ PERSPECTIVE, large-scale composting must be a strange new world. They’ve made no conscious attempt to befriend us; instead, they have just continued their slow, incremental work, adapting to the intrusion of our streets and cities the best they can. But now, only recently, we have begun to take notice of them and to realize that they could be of some service to us. We lay this gift in front of them: our garbage. In doing so, we may set about a revolutionary change in the long history of earthworms on the planet. For the first time, we are attempting to domesticate worms.
A species has been chosen—in this case, Eisenia fetida—that has some qualities that are useful to us. Isn’t that how we always choose an animal for domestication? A dog guards the house, a cow produces milk, a honeybee pollinates the crops and deposits honey into the hives we build for them. So now we’re striking a bargain with worms, offering them the same deal we’ve always offered to creatures that are useful to us: food, lodging, and unchecked reproduction in exchange for their labor, their output.
Darwin had a keen interest in domestication and its effects on species. Here was an example of evolution at high speed—a carrier pigeon, a racehorse, or even a tomato could be bred and cross-bred to suit our purposes, altering the species far more quickly than it would ever evolve in nature. Even without deliberate cross-breeding, he realized that a creature could adapt itself to us if that was in its best interests. If a slight variation in a hen or a housecat makes it more successful around humans—gets it more food or better shelter—wouldn’t that variation gradually become more pronounced in each successive generation? I have an unusually sweet-tempered cat that never claws the furniture, keeps his long silky coat free of mats and mud, and stays near me without demanding too much of my attention. This cat happens to display the qualities that I appreciate in a pet. In the long run, a cat like this might reproduce more successfully thanks to its ability to please humans. It is pleasant enough to think of those traits migrating through the feline gene pool over time. But it is also an extraordinary influence for us to have over any creature. In his book The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Darwin described this process of selection as “the paramount power, whether applied by man to the formation of domestic breeds, or by nature to the production of species.”
Something else Darwin wrote stuck with me. He was describing the accidents of breeding that can happen during domestication—the way that selecting an animal for one trait might encourage other related, but not necessarily desirable, traits to prosper as well. He probably wasn’t thinking about earthworms at the time, but what he said struck a chord, because he mentioned the one anatomical feature that is indispensable to an earthworm: its intestine. Writing about the power of the clumsy human breeder, he said, “In the living animal or plant he cannot observe internal modifications in the more important organs; nor does he regard them as long as they are compatible with health and life. What does the breeder care about any slight change in the molar teeth of his pigs, or for an additional molar tooth in the dog; or for any change in the intestinal canal or other internal organ?”
The truth is, there is little cause for worry about the future evolution of the earthworm’s intestine. Earthworms are simple, stable creatures; there is not a great deal of variation between two worms of the same species anyway and domestication is not likely to give rise to any highly unusual new traits. Let them eat our garbage—we can use their help, and their castings. And there is still a great deal of genetic diversity among earthworms. There are plenty of worm species left in the wild, species that are wholly unsuited for domestication and will continue their work in the soil as long as we don’t disturb them or drive them out.
Eisenia fetida is the perfect worm for domestication. It thrives in waste. A pile of garbage is its home. The fact that we can also use it to bait a hook or feed a chicken makes it all the more suited for life alongside humans. In fact, unlike the domestication of cats or dogs, the domestication of the red wiggler requires no changes on the part of the worm. It is already fully equipped to do the job we’re asking it to do, which seems like an extraordinary coincidence. Perhaps Eisenia fetida, by following the spread of humans around the globe over the last few million years, and moving into our paddocks and our garbage dumps, has already adapted itself to us. Maybe it has been domesticated all along, and it has just been waiting for us to notice.