Lyons Worm Works
Ben Rodman is a vermicomposter with a love for all things biology and horticulture. His vermicomposting operation, Lyons Worm Works, has grown from simply diverting and reclaiming their household organic wastes into a small-scale but growing community effort.
Combined with all the spent substrate from their gourmet mushroom cultivation and gardening and brewing waste, Lyons Worm Works creates high-quality, microbially dense and diverse living vermicast for regional consumers. For Ben, providing quality vermicast to customers means having objective measurements of its quality for multiple reasons: integrity and trust, quality assurance, marketing, and constant experimentation to improve his product and process.
“Experimentation and real data has always been important to me; bridging my idealism with the real world we live in and grow our food and medicine in. microBIOMETER® is giving me fast, quantitative data to assess important considerations like feedstock quality, evaluating the impacts of process changes, durability and storage for finished product, and for fine-tuning my compost tea kit recipes so customers can make high-quality aerated teas at home. Having a fast, accurate and objective way to assess my products provides me with the data needed to make informed decisions. It gives my customers and I confidence that my products are going to help them meet their goals. What a great product for the small producer like me, for whom a home lab isn’t practical and routine commercial lab testing is prohibitively costly!”
Green Country Worms is a small worm farm located in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. Their main focus is producing high quality worm castings. They started vermicomposting in 2008 when they received their first pound of compost worms. 12 years later they still love composting with worms and are fascinated with the worm castings they produce.
About a year ago they discovered their customers wanted proof of the quality of their product. While they could make claims about their worm castings, their customers wanted to see actual data. They periodically sent their castings to a certified lab to be tested, however, this is costly to do on a regular basis.
They love the microBIOMETER® soil test because it is affordable and it gives them a quick census of the microorganisms in their castings. They learned early on that a simple NPK soil test did not give them the data they were looking for. Being research minded they were also happy to find out that microBIOMETER® is involved in various university studies to demonstrate it’s validity and reliability as a soil testing instrument.
Green Country is currently using microBIOMETER® to compare worm castings that are produced with high quality malted barley. They feed malted barley in some of their worm bins and not in others.
Stay tuned! We will post the results of their experiment once it is complete.
