It’s been almost ten years since Brent and Marykae Broberg decided to add an interesting creature to their family farm: African nightcrawlers. Thousands of them.
Brent Broberg had never considered farming worms until he read an article about it. Once he read it, he couldn’t get them off his mind.
His new interest paired with rising instability in the hog market led him and his wife to take a leap of faith and invest in some earthworms.
Initially, Broberg thought he would raise the worms for bait. But it’s actually their castings, better known as worm poop, that drives the business.
Broberg tore out the pens of his 500-head hog finisher building and started moving in all the materials the worms would need.
Taking out the first pen was a big step for Broberg.
“I sat there and I literally thought, ‘Alright Brent, is this really what you want?’” he said. “Because I’m like once you do it and I start hauling the gates out, no turning back then.”
At the farm, Broberg raises worms in crates that are about a foot deep. The crates, filled with peat moss, are where they spend two weeks eating, mating and laying eggs.
The worms are incredibly sensitive to cold temperatures, so Broberg has learned to keep the peat moss around 70 degrees. He achieves that through heated floors and an electric heater to keep the worms protected from outer elements.
Keeping the worms alive during cold, dry winters has proved challenging.
“You can’t fool a worm,” Broberg said. “They know it’s winter. Their biological clock knows it’s wintertime, and so it’s harder to keep them alive.”
After the worms have spent two weeks in the peat moss, Broberg puts them through a trommel that a fellow worm farmer in Wisconsin built for him.
The trommel is a large cylindrical drum that sits on an angle and has different sized screens along its walls: the first to separate the peat moss, the second to separate the eggs and the third to separate the castings. The remaining worms spin out at the end of the trommel.
Broberg said worms typically live about 100 weeks. They produce the most eggs between 20 and 40 weeks.
Before transforming the hog finisher into a space large enough for the worms, he kept a couple hundred in a few crates on his parents’ land just a few miles from his own. He wasn’t selling much either, mostly in 15 to 30 pound quantities to farmers who already knew the product well. Now, he sells by the ton.
“We kind of went into the bulk end of it, which was easier for us just to put it in a sack, a one-ton super sack,” Broberg said. “And it was almost, believe it or not, easier to sell one-ton super sacks than it was 30 pound sacks, just because the people that use that are bigger companies, and they know what it is.”
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Categories: New York, Crops