Waste, Worms, Humus: Vermicycling, Vermiculture, Vermicompost
Food Processing of Food Scraps
Many experienced worm keepers chop up their food before putting it in the worm bin. Quite a few
freeze the scraps first. You can easily find (for $300+) a non-worm-based product that will compost food scraps,
and it depends on a "predigester" which chops the food and lets the preliminary bacterial action
take hold first.
I'm seeing a trend here. (What I am not seeing is much practical research into these things.)
My research indicates that if you really want to crank up the Vermicycling productivity,
the initial stages of decomposition should happen first (a few days to a couple weeks),
and then let the worms at it. Otherwise,
you have food sitting in the worm bin that's not ready to be eaten by your worms. Oh, they'll get
to it real soon, but that part of the worm bin could be full of mature food and Red Wigglers.
We need to do some testing to confirm all this, but these Red Wigglers are pretty dang adaptable
and prolific, if you just give them some time. It seems clear to me that
we can easily specify
a simple worm hatchery to ramp up our worm population,
and that the current state of the art is more than well advanced enough to set up the
Vermicyclers we'll need to establish. We will need thousands of hatcheries, but also cycling beds
for all those hatcheries.
There are many management and logistics reasons for making sure that the hatcheries are close to
some standard and that any variations are known. If one accepts this as a design imperative, then
it becomes critical for the food source to be as uniform and controlled
as possible.
So there it is: we cannot let our hatcheries be fed by whatever food scraps an individual
household produces. At a minimum, we need to set that worm hatchery up with a known quantity
of food. We can find the optimum weight over time, but only if we have good uniform data
to react to. Things like pH, density, even color will be valuable data we can gather over
time.
Handling of Food Waste
Yuck, huh?
Who wants to deal with rotten, smelly food waste? Mrs. Susie-Q Soccer Mom ain't gonna sign up
for any of that action. Can you blame her?
Well, guess what? Food Waste isn't what you think it is, not after you take a bit of an
Engineering approach to the situation. First of all, we are getting the waste right from the source,
before it has mixed with all kinds of other waste streams. That alone makes a huge difference, both in terms
of simply not smearing it all over the place and in terms of freshness.
After all, this food waste? Just a few minutes ago most of it was actual, you know, food.
Fit for human consumption
and all that. Well almost, anyway, we're just talking table scraps, trimmings, peelings, corings and such
here. (I don't get into the nitty gritty details here, see
the forums; but the operation would handle scenarios like "50 pounds of 6-month old science experiments
from the refrigerator in the garage".)
Still, garbage is garbage, and
once you throw it out, you don't want to be looking at it, much less handling it again.
I get that, trust me. But hey, the only technology really needed here is called a "Closed Container".
This is not Rocket Science: There's these things called 'buckets', and cheap plastic containers, etc.,
even clear zip-lock bags may be acceptable. If you want a customized solution, you can get plastic
(PVC or ABS) pipe at any hardware store, and you can grab some fittings and glue and make one. I'll
be noodling with a design along these lines.
Having a way to transport the waste without spills is half the battle. This subscription service
(see the 'Vision' page) is already
planning on having "Worm Technicians" who will be delivering pre-processed Food Waste, doing monthly check-ups
of and finishing the set-up of hatcheries, so they can pick up food waste at the same time.
Theoretically, there is an unlimited amount of food waste available for this enterprise for at least the first
five years of operation, and the ultimate scale of the system will work itself out.
But the practical situation is not so clear.
How exactly are we going to get access to this waste stream
at just the right volume and timing so that our main concern can be helping customers and managing
worms and worm bins?
Right now, waste-haulers are in the business of transporting this waste stream we're looking
at, and Metro is the controlling legal entity. I expect (but haven't done the research yet) that somewhere there
is a legal prohibition on collecting food waste on a commercial basis outside of the licensed haulers.
Getting to the bottom of the legal situation is the next phase after this site is up and running, once I can
remove the invisible
'under construction' icon on this website. Get on the
mailing list (also go to the forums) and you'll get updates as we become informed together.
Balancing the Flow
OK, let's assume that we get this by the government and somehow we get the suits and cloaks onboard with
us gathering food waste, as long as it goes straight into our vermiculture operation.
Let's take a look at the flow of worm food here.
- Worm Food
- A mixture of Municipal Food Waste as processed, contained and delivered for use in
Vermicycling operations. (This site is focused on the residential segment of the municipality.)
Our subscribers will be giving us some extra food, but in general they are going to want to feed their
own personal bin as soon as possible.
(On the other hand, maybe they will opt-in and use our worm food.)
We can set them up with our stuff to help their personal bin get up to speed soonest,
but typically we're only really looking at getting a month's worth of food from them. After that, maybe
they have a few extras for us when we visit, but it will be in very small volume.
This is another reason why having each
new subscriber keep a hatchery for us is so critical to the whole operation: As we grow, we can count on a
matching amount of processed food waste being deposited in their hosted bin. So in the big picture, subscriber growth
lets us move worm food. If we have a glut, we can make up more hatcheries until we balance out. We'll likely need
non-subscriber storage for that, but that should be a manageable situation.
Every new subscriber will provide a chunk of demand for the worm food we produce; that food is going to
the hatcheries, and every hatchery we start represents a chunk of flow in a pipeline of worms looking for
their adult home.
When the time comes to spread out the contents of that plastic tote, since we love our worms, we are going to be
looking to get them into their new home as soon as possible, to show them to their wormy destiny: Vermicycling.
Leveling the load
Getting back to getting our food supply at just the right rate: that's going to be the trick. We
can't count on our subscribers.
What we need is the food scraps from their neighbors, people not keeping personal worm bins.
The more concentrated the participation in the area where we are operating, the better.
(NW Portland, I'm thinking about you guys, for starters)
But again, I don't know about the legal aspects and just how that would work. I promise to update these
pages: what you are reading here is always the current status of things, and as seems proper in this
age of transparency, :-) I'll make all previous versions of pages available.
The main point here is that, initially the plan is to assume that we can get all the food we want, allowing us
to figure out how to run things on that basis.
To the extent that this all-you-can-eat assumption turns out
not to be true, the plan is simply to adjust the plan as required.
The Worm Math page will have more material on balancing the flows of food and worms as I develop it.
Most of the Worm Food goes to Professional Vermicyclers, a new home-based business model
Again, the alert reader will have questions: So the worm food that doesn't go into hatcheries goes to
Vermicomposting Beds, isn't that where most of the food goes? Where are these beds located?
Answer: That's right.
We are building up a worm population so that they can populate systems designed for
maximum cycling performance
(eating the food as fast as possible). To house all those worms and get them fed on
a large scale, as a first proposal, we could be looking at renting abandoned grocery stores or big box retailer
buildings and so forth. But what I have in mind is Distributed Vermiculture.
So what we're really looking for is to have our subscribers upgrade to full
Professional Vermicycler. Picture a spare bedroom full of worm bins, taking weekly deliveries of barrels of worm
food and directly creating carbon offsets. I have work to do on this as well and will keep you posted here.
Have I mentioned the
mailing list?
Worm Food Quality
Favorite Waste Foods for Making Worm Food
Red Wiggler Worms apparently have favorite foods. What these favorites have in common is that they are all
fruits and vegetables that sometimes get left in the field, garden, orchard, etc. to rot. If there are Red Wigglers around,
they will colonize the rotting fruit, squash, cucumber, melons and such. (Note that this is an unconfirmed conclusion
on my part.)
Bernie the Worm says "Aged Cow Manure is great, but I loves me my pumpkin!" :-)
Dairy and Meat: Bad
What composting worms DO NOT LIKE is meat. Nature has other ways to take care of rotting flesh. It's a whole
different community of critters, from the bacteria on up. Even so, it's not like meat is poison to your worms.
I'd wager you
could throw a chunk of meat in the bottom of a deep worm bin, well buried and if you left it alone long enough,
like what, a year or more maybe, it too would become worm castings. I'd imagine it would be Nitrogen-rich at that.
Worms also do not handle dairy products well. At least that's what many people say. I've read that cheese is fine,
although it takes a while.
I'd sure like to have a high school science class or ten look into these questions.
It seems reasonable that Milk and Meat, in some maximum percentage, could be allowed in our worm food criteria,
but this is not known. A great topic for the forums.
Given that some of the collected food waste, from individual contributors,
is going to contain meat and dairy - even if we tightly control it, some will
always get thru - the blending system of our worm food production line will need to deal with it. There are
various engineering techniques for this, but the point here is that if people are being given points or
credits or some other receipt for their contribution of food waste,
there will need to be a way of
downgrading the value of the stuff with excess meat and dairy content.
This implies a monitoring and punishment system, in order to find a way to insure the exclusion
of things like heavy metals and toxins. You have to allow for the evil malcontent who pours
mercury into his waste food for this program. Also, the guy who absent-mindedly scrapes his
steak scraps, bones and all, into the system without even realizing it -
that guy is going to a factor. Solutions to these problems will avail upon proper engineering.
