Anglian Worms
August 23rd 2007 20:12
I came across an article yesterday in the Eastern Daily Press on Anglian Worms (not Anglican, as I’d first thought). Anglian Worms is a small business run mostly by Amanda Jennings and is in the middle of nowhere (in my New Zealand terms). It’s actually at what they call an industrial estate some eight miles past Fakenham in Norfolk. The estate was formerly a mushroom farm, and the mushroomers left behind a large number of what look like Nissan huts. Various businesses have taken these over, and Anglian Worms rents a couple of them.
Because I’ve been interested in the idea of worm farming since I left my proper job, I rang Amanda and asked if we could come and talk to her. She was very welcoming, gave us a cup of coffee the moment we arrived, and
spent the next three-quarters of an hour telling us about her experiences.
She’s been running the business for around 18 months, and is only now beginning to make some profit out of it. There have been various pitfalls, and there’s been a lot of learning. She has a farming background, and says farmers in general are helpful to one another when it comes to problems and difficulties. Worm farmers, she’s found, are keen on keeping their secrets. Not that there are many secrets, you’d think, since worms have been around a fair while, and anyway, Amanda stepped right outside this sphere of secrecy and was happy to share as much as she could with us.
In her first ‘hut’ she has her office, some smaller worm plastic boxes, some larger wooden-encased sections, and a lot of horse manure. This is covered up by plastic sheeting which apparently heats up the manure and cooks it, making the process of breaking it down a good deal quicker. In the second hut she has some twenty large boxes set on the concrete floor. They were built by her husband (who’s a farmer) and are around three metres by two. A few thousand worms will live in each of these - and multiply.
Like any business, the biggest issues come with the marketing. (Though the physical work involved in worm farming is considerable too). Worms can be sold to fishermen - via fishing shops - to home gardeners and in some other areas. However, getting a foothold in these areas is a major task, one that’s still taking up a good deal of Amanda’s time. Still, with the increase of interest in things ecological, she seems to me to be in the right business.
You wouldn’t think worms would need much looking after, and in a sense they don’t: watering when it’s warm, and feeding (this comes from a combination of the horse manure and peat, in Anglian Worms case.) They physical side of the job is in turning horse manure, filling up the boxes, and packing and so on - and, hardest of all, sorting out worms from the compost. Sit down and think about finding some thousand worms in a large container of compost. By hand. (Apparently there are machines that will do the job, but they often kill worms in the process.)
For me, having the large box containers on the ground brought problems in terms of having to reach down into them to get the worms. If I was starting up a worm farm, I think I’d make sure the worms were more accessible than that; up on some frame if possible.
There was one other thing that was of particular interest. England, of course, is packed with dogs (there are far more pet shops here than in NZ), and of course, where there are dogs, there is poo. Amanda supplies the Pet Poo Worm Farm, a series of plastic containers which come with their own worms. The worms deal with the poo far more efficiently than your average refuse site - that’s if the latter will take it at all.
Because I’ve been interested in the idea of worm farming since I left my proper job, I rang Amanda and asked if we could come and talk to her. She was very welcoming, gave us a cup of coffee the moment we arrived, and
Amanda Jennings and some of her worms - they're camera shy.
She’s been running the business for around 18 months, and is only now beginning to make some profit out of it. There have been various pitfalls, and there’s been a lot of learning. She has a farming background, and says farmers in general are helpful to one another when it comes to problems and difficulties. Worm farmers, she’s found, are keen on keeping their secrets. Not that there are many secrets, you’d think, since worms have been around a fair while, and anyway, Amanda stepped right outside this sphere of secrecy and was happy to share as much as she could with us.
In her first ‘hut’ she has her office, some smaller worm plastic boxes, some larger wooden-encased sections, and a lot of horse manure. This is covered up by plastic sheeting which apparently heats up the manure and cooks it, making the process of breaking it down a good deal quicker. In the second hut she has some twenty large boxes set on the concrete floor. They were built by her husband (who’s a farmer) and are around three metres by two. A few thousand worms will live in each of these - and multiply.
Like any business, the biggest issues come with the marketing. (Though the physical work involved in worm farming is considerable too). Worms can be sold to fishermen - via fishing shops - to home gardeners and in some other areas. However, getting a foothold in these areas is a major task, one that’s still taking up a good deal of Amanda’s time. Still, with the increase of interest in things ecological, she seems to me to be in the right business.
You wouldn’t think worms would need much looking after, and in a sense they don’t: watering when it’s warm, and feeding (this comes from a combination of the horse manure and peat, in Anglian Worms case.) They physical side of the job is in turning horse manure, filling up the boxes, and packing and so on - and, hardest of all, sorting out worms from the compost. Sit down and think about finding some thousand worms in a large container of compost. By hand. (Apparently there are machines that will do the job, but they often kill worms in the process.)
For me, having the large box containers on the ground brought problems in terms of having to reach down into them to get the worms. If I was starting up a worm farm, I think I’d make sure the worms were more accessible than that; up on some frame if possible.
There was one other thing that was of particular interest. England, of course, is packed with dogs (there are far more pet shops here than in NZ), and of course, where there are dogs, there is poo. Amanda supplies the Pet Poo Worm Farm, a series of plastic containers which come with their own worms. The worms deal with the poo far more efficiently than your average refuse site - that’s if the latter will take it at all.
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