Article on the Business of Worm Composting

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A good friend of mine sent me this article, so I thought I'd share with you here:

The worm turns ... a profit
by Dianne Rinehart
August 7, 2007 at 5:19 PM EDT

On the website of Cathy's Crawly Composters is a cartoon titled "Getting Into Heaven in the 21st Century.

In it, St. Peter is querying a would-be entrant on his recycling habits. Did he recycle: "absolutely." How about composting? Well he lived in an apartment. Well what about using composting worms? Well he didn't have a balcony. What about your living room, asks St. Pete. "Worms in my living room? For Pete's sake!" answers our hero—before realizing he's doomed.

Humour helps when you're selling a product with a "yuck" factor as high as a pound of worms, says Cathy Nesbitt, whose Bradford, Ont.-based company has been selling "mail-order" composting worms since 2002 to apartment and condo dwellers as far a field as California. As does educating the public about how incredible worms actually are — and what they can accomplish with kitchen scraps. A pound of worms and their descendents — yes, they have sex, but smartly won't reproduce if there's not enough food — can transform a ton of waste a year into rich fertilizer. And that's handy since that's how much organic waste the average family produces a year, notes Nesbitt.

For the rest of the article, go here.