Vermiculture at Productos Orgánicos Don Juan
By Rick Wendling

Travelling to the earthworm farm at Don Juan Xidó with Miguel Gil was half the adventure. We drove out of San Miguel on Calzada de la Estación, passed the train station and kept going…passed La Trinidad Organic Farm and kept going…until the road ended at Presa Allende.

We waved our arms frantically at the man on the opposite shore who crossed the Presa in his small faded blue boat and ferried us to the other side. From there, a leisurely 15-minute walk through the village of Don Juan Xidó, with plenty of stops to say hello to neighbors, brought us to Rancho Gaia, the headquarters of Productos Orgánicos Don Juan.

Productos Orgánicos Don Juan is the brain child of Miguel Gil, who was kind enough to take me on a tour last week. Miguel emphasized that vermiculture (earthworm-farming) is a sustainable business with products that are in demand. Three years ago, each of the five families in the co-op contributed 2,500 pesos to the 80,000-peso start-up cost and a government grant provided the balance. Last year the co-op reported a profit of 180,000 pesos. 

The earthworm farm is a small operation but surprisingly productive. The beauty of their design is that nothing goes to waste and the only raw material is organic waste. The farm consists of a series of concrete trenches with drainage pipes in the bottoms.

The trenches are filled with worms and the growing medium (they use cow manure). Misters are suspended above the trenches to simplify the task of keeping them moist. The entire assemblage is housed in a greenhouse to maintain the warm, humid environment that worms need to thrive. 

Once the worm-beds are built and populated, all the worm farmers need to do is turn the worm beds every day to ensure proper aeration, mist the beds to keep them damp and harvest the fruits of their labors. After all, worms only do three things; masticate, defecate and procreate. And each of these activities produces a very marketable product: ‘worm tea,’ compost and (of course) more worms.

The drainage pipes in the bottom of the worm beds collect worm tea which is filtered to remove any solids and packaged in five-liter jugs. When diluted with an equal amount of water, worm tea is a nutrient-rich fertilizer for garden plants. 

Worms are very efficient eaters (see side bar) and a well-run worm farm can produce a crop of high-grade compost about every three weeks. To harvest the compost, the farmer withholds food from the worms for a few days. When a fresh meal of manure is added to one side of the bed, the hungry worms quickly move into the food, allowing the farmer to harvest worm-free compost. This compost is packaged and sold to buyers throughout Mexico.

Productos Orgánicos Don Juan currently sells live worms for delivery in Mexico. Most are purchased by people who want to start their own worm farms or do worm composting at their homes. In the future they may also produce worm powder, a high-protein additive for animal feed, made from dried worms that can be sold on the international commodities market.

If you want to purchase compost, liquid fertilizer or worms for your garden, you currently have to make the trip to Rancho Gaia in person. The co-op is designing retail kiosks to be stocked with Productos Orgánicos Don Juan products for placement in local nurseries. Contact Miguel Gil at migilald@yahoo.com  or 152-8378. A map to the farm is available at http://tiny.cc/ranchogaiamap.