Fully Integrated Gardening, Livestock Feed, Vermiculture and Waste Management
I’ve recently become a nut for vermiculture (that is — worm farming). Its not just the worms, I’m more considering a completely balanced integrated system that allows you to homestead and micro farm without needing to outsource anything. It provides for itself — from waste management, to fertilizing, etc. An integrated system that can scale into infinity.
So the general theory is this — raise chickens for egg and meat. Chickens produce manure which you then hot-compost along with various types of carbon-based trash (newspaper, cardboard boxes, grass clippings from the yard, etc). After about six months of hot-composting, the chicken manure/carbon trash compost is then safe for worm farming. Adding this compost along with other organic trash which is immediately consumable by worms (such as fruit peelings and grass clippings) along with other types of trash that worms love (more newspaper and cardboard) — you end up with high quality fertilizer and a quantity of worms. Worms tend to duplicate themselves every two months, and what do chickens just love to eat? That’s right — worms. The high end fertilizer can be used directly in a greenhouse or garden, or made into worm casting’s tea, allowing you to grow quality fresh produce.
Here are the benefits of this type of system:
- Fresh chicken and eggs
- Free chicken food and fishing bait
- Fresh garden produce
- Free fertilizer
Every part of the system is integrated. The chicken’s feed is offset by worms. The garden’s fertilizer requirements are offset by worm castings. The worm’s food is recycled chicken manure and trash that would otherwise be sent to the dump.
There are other benefits to this sort of system as well. For instance, take a chicken farm operation that is mainly designed to produce broilers (chickens which are raised for approximately 45 days from hatching and then consumed). If someone were to set up a system like this, there would normally be a lot of waste byproducts. If you scale this system up (a commercial broiler producing operation), then there would be a large volume of chicken droppings to contend with. Recycling the manure into hot compost, and then to vermiculture — turns this waste product into something beneficial.
Continuing with the benefits of this type of system — every household has a large amount of waste products. These include paper waste (cardboard, newspapers, product packaging, etc.) as well as organic waste (fruit peels, grass clippings and other lawn brush). We all know that landfills are being filled up and that the current setup of waste management in this country is not sustainable. Much of the waste forwarded to landfills will be consumed by this system, as worms love paper products and organic waste matter.
A quality farm that can produce a high volume of vegetables will require a large volume of fertilizer. Fertilizer is not cheap! If you love to garden, buying fertilizer on a small scale does not make a big dent in your wallet. However, if you are considering scaling this system up and producing several huge greenhouses with free fertilizer, the costs can become enormous. One of the beauties of this integrated system is the worm castings. I personally have five acres of land. To produce enough high quality worm fertilizer to farm the entire area will require a system that scales up easy. When finding the perfect balance however, I hope to have enough free fertilizer to manage without needing to buy commercial fertilizer.
I am currently in the process of setting up a system like this, and taking notes. In particular to nail down the exact details of percentages in order to scale the system up. For instance, what quantity of hot compost — will feed what volume of worms — will produce what volume of fertilizer for a particular garden size — will produce what quantity of excess worms — will help sustain what volume of chicken broilers, and back to the beginning (chickens producing hot compost).
What comes first, the chicken or the worm? I have started with chickens, I currently have 30 being raised as broilers with plans to raise much more. The reason I started with chickens is because their manure must hot compost for at least six months, and you must start by composting a full cubic yard all at once, mixing it 1 to 1 with carbon trash such as newspapers or grass clippings.
I also have my first batch of red wigglers growing. I started with a pound — they double every two months. I figure it may take me ten months to get my first pile of chicken manure composted, and by then I should have 32 pounds of red wigglers (five cycles of doubling, 1 x 2 = 2, 2 x 2 = 4, 4 x 2 = 8, 8 x 2 = 16, 16 x 2 = 32). For now I’m feeding them with newspaper and fruit peelings (its funny when you’re suddenly responsible for feeding worms, how much more bananas and watermelon you eat!) It takes a few months for worms to work through a pile of compost which has already been hot-composted, so I look forward to starting the greenhouse within a year.
