Wood Worm Farms

Since approximately 10,000 years ago some human hunter-gatherers discovered a way to domesticate wild plants and animals and to use land to grow crops. This was the beginning of agriculture and we call that time “the dawn of civilization”.
The invention of agriculture was a major change in human adaptation to the nature.
Instead of adapting themselves to changing environment they learned to adapt the environment to their changing needs. (This is, actually, what we call “technology”.)
The way to change the environment is pretty simple – grow the plants and animals, you need, and destroy those, that bother you. Using agriculture the same piece of land can feed much more people, then hunting-gathering. But with the time soils loose their fertility. The later inventions of several-fields system, irrigation, fertilizers, insecticides and many other things didn’t stop the process of soil degradation. Why is it so?
While hunter-gathering style was more or less sustainable, the agriculture caused slow destruction of existing ecosystems. For some reason a wild sustainable ecosystem can maintain its soil fertility and even improve it. From other hand there is no way back to hunting-gathering (unless we reduce the world population by 99%). So the only way to survive, in a long term, is to advance more our technology. We have to move to sustainable agriculture.
The goal of sustainable agriculture is to create an artificial ecological structure that is capable to renew, and possibly improve itself, while producing needed harvest. In this structure, human intervention is to bring balance to the artificial system, i.e. to build the ecological relations and maintain them.
This is not an easy task requiring knowledge of ecosystems functionality and functions of each of its components. But it’s not an impossible (or impractical) business.
The simple example of an artificial ecosystem is an aquaponic system.
This system is relatively easy to balance and control.
A much harder problem is field agriculture in a temperate forest zone. It’s not clear how to get the needed harvest from a natural ecosystem of the forest, or how to change that ecosystem to keep the new one sufficiently sustainable.
The new era of human civilization is to integrate into nature, changing it so it will supply our needs and we shall support it's renewability. It will be a kind of symbiosis, something like beneficial parasitism.

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It's 1.5 year since I've got my Indian Blue worms. At some point I was sure that they all are lost. But once in a while they make their appearance. It's hard to find them in my bins.
When our Indian friends came to see the worms I couldn't find a single Indian worm for them.
So they came to conclusion, that all Indians are too shy.

Today is a lucky day - I found a single specimen! I found it when I was collecting a daily sacrifice for the fish. So this lucky guy escaped his tragic end.
Collecting worms to feed the fish gives an idea of overage worm population in the bin.
Since I pick worms from relatively random spots, the data should be more or less realistic.

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The new place is a new-build greenhouse on Carya Farm's land.
We have a medium and a large scale vermicomposting units, (the medium-scale vermicomposter is shown on the picture), a lot of space and friendly atmosphere.
Now it will be much more convenient to visit the place, to get bins and worms, to see
the vermicomposting in action and to get some experience on how to make vermicompost.
Also the final product itself will have immediate use for greenhouse needs.

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I started this aquarium on August 23, 2009 with 11 wild fish.
At the beginning the fish were too shy. And I had a problem of what and how to feed them.
When I lost 4 of them in the next two weeks I thought there is no chance for the others.
But one day I decided to feed them some worms from an outdoor bin, that was filled with grass clippings and dead leaves. And that worked! Later I added to their diet feeder platys.
Now they seem to happily eat even the worms from indoor - 'food scrap' - bins and saw-bugs.
Their behaviour also changed. They became less shy and even recognize me, when I bring the worms.
Generally the whole aquaponic system functions well. From all the seeds I planted in the trays only water cress and basil prosper. The lights are insufficient for lettuce, chives, spinach and dill.
It's hard to judge on if the fish grew or not (the fact that those seven survived is more then enough by itself). This will probably need more time.
Some statistics:
7 fish eat in average 17 worms a day. Each worm weight is approximately 1g.
So total in a week = 119g = 1/4lb, in a year 6,205 g = 13.7 lb
This daily quantity of worms is usually found in a volume of 2 cubic inch of an upper tray of my bin. It looks like the worms easily replenish their losses.

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Wood Worm Farms had reached an agreement with Ferme du Zéphyr and Carya Farm to host a medium size vermicomposting unit in a new-built greenhouse.
This greenhouse should become a new stage in vermicomposting on Montreal West Island.
Around 15% of its area will be dedicated for worm bins. The vermicompost will be used for growing organic crops for popular baskets supplied by both farms. The excess worms will help to reduce the price for a pound of worms in Canada.
This agreement is showing an increasing understanding of necessity to grow organic produce and use organic fertilizers.

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