These microbes form the connection between the plant, soil and wider environment. They are major proliferators of plant-relevant microbes. Soil that has been through the gut of a worm has 10 to 20 times more microbes than surrounding soil. When we say they poo out some microbes, that’s not an insignificant thing. Beautiful, healthy soil in other words! When compared to surrounding soil, worm cast has a huge amount of plant-available minerals: seven times more phosphorus, five times more nitrogen, 11 times more potassium, three times more exchangeable magnesium and one and a half times more calcium. Their excreta contains some of these microbes plus their by-products (such as enzymes and hormones which stimulate plant growth), and a rich humus of stable carbon, all mooshed in with the sediment particles. It’s also kind of like a chook’s gizzard in that they swallow grit to physically grind what they’ve eaten. They have a gut which, like ours, utilises microbes to extract nutrition from what they ingest. And their back end is a perfect biostimulant distribution system, straight to where it’s needed at the plant root. Their middle is an anaerobic bacterial fermentation system (kind of like the crock you make sauerkraut in). Their front end is an organic matter reducer and shredder. Objectively speaking they are also incredibly important animals for soil building and soil fertility. They have five pairs of hearts, no eyes or lungs, are covered in hairs called setae that act like anchors, and when two copulate they both have offspring. We run a commercial worm farm on Oxley Island, NSW, and we think worms (specifically earthworms) are rad. We were invited to Groundswell as innovators in regenerative agriculture, to talk about “the power of worms”. You can download the full publication here.īy Lee Fieldhouse and Kirsty Hughes from Island Biologicals. This article was originally published in ‘An Artist, a Farmer and a Scientist Walk into a Bar’ in 2021 by the Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation.
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