Wood Worm Farms

It seems like the Worms in a flower pot experiment came to its end.
The lily in the pot is growing very good. It even gave a nice flower a month ago.
The worms, unfortunately, disappeared.
It proves, that compost worms need constant supply of organic material and can't eat live plants.

[ add comment ] ( 4 views )   |  permalink  |   ( 3 / 172 )

Nice movie. A little bit too emotional, and I would say masochistic, but the main questions are good.
The most ipmortant of them, I think, is about using technology in food industry.
More generally, the question is: are we allowed to manipulate complex biological systems without understanding them properly? Is this OK, to remove "extra" levels in ecosystems, change live conditions, food habits and genetics of living things?
Movie brings many examples: genetically modified chickens, grown in
dark and dirty places, cows fed by corn, the corn itself, soya bins, etc.
It seems like most of them are negative, that actually makes some sence.
As by an old programmers' joke "if it works - don't touch it", there is a risk in any such manipulation. The nature was working four billion years to create those chickens and cows.
It seems, that we are not quite ready to understand its ways.
If so, the sure way is to follow the nature's path.
The only more or less sustainable human sosiety, until now, were the hunter-gatherers, with all the problems of hard life in the wild. Current "sustainable" farming projects are not sustanable in reality. They ruin natural ecosystems, pollute, cause soil erosion.
The both systems in any case can't feed world's population of 6*10exp(9) humans. Hence there is no way back, nor to primitive farming nether to hunting-gathering.
But what to do? The movie has no answer (otherwise they could go straight away to collect their Nobel prize.)
As it seems to me, the solution will come from the next level of technology development, with better understanding of ecology and life. And there are many early examples of these technologies now.(Growing Power, aquaponics, vermicompost...).

So may be our problems are only developmental diseases? Let's hope we'll survive...

[ add comment ]   |  permalink  |   ( 3 / 108 )

It's really easy to grow water cress at home. Just make an aquaponic system, and plant seeds. The nature takes care for the rest. Water cress in an aquaponic system grows fast, better then other plants. It doesn't need much light or any fertilizers.
On the picture above is the water cress after I collected three large, grocery-store-size bunches for a delicious soup I never tasted before. All the family enjoyed it. It took 4 months to get the first harvest of this healthy herb. I think the next one will come much sooner.
Here is a full system view
.

[ add comment ]   |  permalink  |   ( 3 / 94 )

This year the holidays fell on a garbage collection day two weeks in a row. And of course,
we had a nice New Year party. It's amazing how much garbage we could produce just in
two weeks! Here on the picture is only the putrescible part of all that mess - around 5lb.
The ~80 gallons recycle bin was overfilled plus one extra bag beside it, all total around 40lb.
(We don't pack, or cut, or order our recyclable items). The organics weighed around 22lb -
the double norm for my bins. For those worm bins it's OK. They can buffer bumpy times without making problems. The key is to add enough bedding material to keep a bin well aerated.
The total diversion rate (including recycling) came to 93%, not bad. But knowing, that 70% of recycle will eventually go to the garbage, it becomes 74%, the compost part is 33%.

[ add comment ]   |  permalink  |   ( 3 / 79 )

The actual question is: "How many worms can be removed from a long-time functional worm bin without affecting its ability to process food waste?" After searching Internet for some
time, I didn't find a theory on this issue. So I decided to make my own approximation.

Data:
- An adult worm weight is approximately 1g, and length is approximately 50mm (2")
- A worm eats its weight of food a day
- Each adult worm lays in overage one cocoon a day
- A cocoon hatches in 30 days
- A worm needs 70 days from hatching to mature stage
- The worms length is proportional to its age

If the incoming food supply is 1000g (2lb) a day, the bin, theoretically can support 1000 adult worms, eating 1g a day. But because of competition, mortality and other factors, worms have a probability to survive. I suppose the the probability for a worm to survive is proportional it its length (age). For example the probability to survive for a worm of 25mm is 1/2 of that probability for a worm of 50mm and so on. This brings the next distribution of worms by consumed food:
500 worms of length 50mm consume 1/2 of all food
500 worms of length 25mm consume 1/4 of all food
500 worms of length 12mm consume 1/8 of all food
500 worms of length 6mm consume 1/16 of all food
500 worms of length 3mm consume 1/32 of all food
The rest of food is consumed by adult worms to produce cocoons.

According to this approximation 500 worms can be removed daily from the bin, after having laid their cocoons. But the life is, of course, more complicated. There are a lot of other factors, that can influence worm population, such as temperature, sicknesses, low quality food, etc. Its hard to account them all. So, as usually the 'rule of thumb', called 80%:20% should work here. I.e. from 'extra' 500 worms 20% are sick, too fat and have already laid their cocoons, so they can be removed for sure, that makes 100 worms daily from a bin, processing 1kg of food waste a day

After all this I can't stop myself from another step - to calculate how much food waste is needed feeding worms to grow one yellow perch fish.
Here is my perch's trophic pyramid:

To grow one fish is needed in overage 2 worms a day for a period of one year.
According to the previous calculation, to collect 100 worms daily we need 365kg of food waste a year. So, to feed the fish with 2 worms a day we need 365kg/50 = 7.3kg of food waste a year.

[ add comment ] ( 1 view )   |  permalink  |   ( 3 / 85 )