Tour of Green Leaf Worm Farm - Hosted by Owner Sean Moore

welcome guys discreetly for a farm where local work company here in Southwest Florida and what we do is we do organic fertilizer and organic insecticide started we're going into our fifth year so while we're doing pretty good and I'll just let you know how we guys got started so if you just follow me into what is now the production room we'll get started on how the company got found okay guys here we are in the production room this is where it all started about five years ago now how we started in the beginning is in order to get the castings you have to sift and separate them from the worms also you have to keep the worms at a certain temperature for maximum production well we did the temperature control with the wall shaker right there we picked that up for a hundred bucks at Walmart and just put it in and then we sifted them made this by hand out of two by twos eighth inch hardware cloth and we sifted it by hand by putting it over a bin originally we had the large bins but what they weighed over a hundred and forty pounds apiece and they were too heavy to deal with so we got rid of them after about six months and moved to our 14 gallon bins each one of these bins held approximately about 5,000 worms and could produce about 35 to 30 pounds of castings per bin we drilled we use 9/16 drill give this one on the large ones as well drill some holes in here and screened everything in I'll screw the sides in like so and drill them has the larger drain holes in the corner because we found over time the water pooled in the corner so we need something bigger use the hole softer that a one-inch one but anyway we kept them on the shelves right here and there used to be shows going around the whole perimeter of this room and there were over 65 bins here and every 21 days there would be a section of shelving which consisted of 15 bins that were ready every 21 days we dated him we'll mark them and rotated them it was a lot of it was a lot of work in the beginning but we got it off the ground and after about three years we saved a little money to go to the next stage which I'll show you here in just a minute guys we are in the warehouse where this isn't we did this about a year and a half two years ago now what we did is all metal building made by Orlando steel company which I highly recommend for any of your metal building needs the inside here the material that you see here there are two types of materials that we did this is called cyrene this is the soft type which is like the inside of your igloo cooler this is the hard type which you get because you're bumping tools and what have you when you're doing production you want something solid this is soft what it does is it cuts Europe they cut your bill down by about 45% as far as your heating and cooling the next the next thing I'm going to show you is my rocket ship which is the sifter it is actually the idea I got from a trouble which is used in mining and it is a seven foot tubular sifter that is used to sift the earthworms out I made it out of made it out of junk basically and we make about three hundred pounds an hour with this particular thing it takes the place of two men and the nice thing about it is I can have it I can turn it on when I need it use it when I need it and like I said it's made out of a hundred percent recyclable parts all right now we're going to get into I built it all this stuff I found in the trash and these are 55 gallon water drums water tanks and cut in half one in the front one in the back and if you look inside here we have plastic baffles plastic baffles are very important a lot of the sisters will try to use the metal baffles and they will cut your worms into a million little pieces so that's important for breaking down the product as well all of this is just a regular pipe come back here this is a screen which comes right off of duct tape and we got straps that to come off and then what's nice about it is and the strength of the screen goes bad we can replace the screen or change out different thicknesses depending on what we need castings go down to the bottom as you see we've got some castings down here right now go to the tarp would shovel out of here which is right back here at the end of this is where the worms stick tube worms fall in one bin and the bigger chunks following the other bin and they get repurposed back into the tent this is basically a pool pump in the back here connected with a Lovejoy connection we run a little bit through here show you the process now we move this over here we have the end open take our scoop right through you what's up as you see the material falling down here and coming out the other end we are at the worm bins these are actually seven people's ideas incorporate it into one start it they are eight feet long four feet wide and you get about twelve to thirteen hundred pounds of material out of each one of these if you notice down here we coffee grounds we add into the worms because that stimulates them to eat we also have a strip of food down the middle which are the black material that you see in the middle we also have a watering system it's a self watering system if you look behind you there on the wall there's a faucet that is associated with each bin he's been has a timer and it's regulated for a certain amount of time each day and they come through the comes through the main hose there and goes off to your main smaller hoses as well and that keeps them pretty well at about 70 percent moisture which you want to keep the worms at we deal with African night crawlers and the bigger bins because they produce the most because they're the largest worm that we deal with anyhow and when we have the best medium to use in the worm bin whether you're starting a big commercial bin like this or just starting a small home bin is peat moss and shredded paper and the most important thing you can do and we do the same thing with this is turn your material make sure there's no dry spots before you add your worms back into your bin if you don't the worms will hit the dry spot in the dock so that's the most important thing that a lot of new people who are just getting into Burma comp compost forget to do anyhow arm we get about 18 inches of material in here because that's as far as the worm will go down into the ground if you get it higher than that you'll just have a bunch of wasted material it won't be castings so we deal we run about ninety seven percent pure here in green leaf form farm and we keep it at a high standard if we keep it a lot of the stuff that you order online will have other materials in it that does not belong there like your sticks and your stone's and things like that they bigger companies use that to add weight we don't do that here takes a little more time but we are all about customer service they're on wheels if you look down here they're on casters eight inch casters is what we use and they roll in and out and that they also have a door on the end like so that lifts up and as it lifts up we shovel out into the sifter over here okay guys now we're going to get into the worm food that we touched on briefly when we talked about the rim though bins what it is is you're casting is is only as good as the food that you feed your worms now the first ingredient that we use and you can get it anywhere is Purina worm chow as you see it looks like this okay second ingredient that we use Mexican tortilla mix very fine unrefined white cornmeal mix called masa you can get that in 50-pound bags at Walmart okay the reason why we use all these different items is worms need diversity in their diet in order to produce the quality of castings that you're going to that you get um and we use wheat flour here again you can get that right at Walmart and we use a couple of things that a lot of your bigger guys won't take the time to use this is a material called azomite this comes from Utah it's a very essential for your trace elements in your work in your worm castings this comes from the comes from the ancient seas out there and it is a hundred percent natural hun percent organic unrefined product you get there are over a hundred trace elements in this item alone so this is where you get a lot of your material for I another thing I want to mention is very important a worm has a gizzard like a chicken it does not have a mouth in the conventional means it's more like a vacuum sucks it up and process it to the gizzard now what it needs is like a chicken it needs a grip grip basically translates to sand what we use volcanic Sam if you look at that it looks like about the consistency of chopped up bricks it's very abrasive and we use that so they can process and grind down and separate the soil into its natural form so that's what we use because it's a little bit a little bit better and a hat and it also has your trace elements in it as well other trace elements that you won't get anywhere else and another thing that we use believe it or not not to be too sarcastic but a worm needs a cup of coffee just like you do in the morning and I'll tell you why because it's very essential to do that because it will stimulate them to eat not only stimulate them to eat it will stimulate them to put on weight which is essential for making baby worms because the worm is asexual or a high Morpha diet they have both sex organs so they do not need another worm to reproduce by the way now that we're on the subject the worms are one are the oldest land animal on earth they have been remained unchanged for 600 million years they are the second oldest thing on the planet the jellyfish is the oldest any how you get the coffee grounds what I would suggest Dunkin Donuts Starbucks any place like that where you get your coffee from and you can use the grounds but you can use the filters two filters are important because the filters will provide fiber for your worms which is very important when you're making worms okay enough about that another thing I also use you can get this at the feed store you probably won't need near this much but I use a 30 pound mineral block they use it in cattle production it has all of your vitamins for your worms a through Z you name it it's in there and it appears in the natural organic form you want to get organic mineral block when you do this at the feed store very important you do that so you don't get the hormones in there and you don't get the chemicals in there so this natural organic mineral block that we use as well okay oh I almost forgot sorry guys ah another thing I want to mention to you is it is very good to use certain types of manure in with your worm food but you want to use a cold maneuver not a hot manure like cow manure or horse manure or chicken manure you don't want to use any of those for a couple of reasons your hormones your growth hormones mainly but also your antibiotics that that they get will be transferred directly to you ah also another thing that happens is you it gets very hot so what happens is you have to wait a year or so to use the product so what you want is a cold manure gulp manure rabbit manure are the two cold manures and worm castings by the way so that's what is also good about this product ah you want to use that you want to use goat poop or your rabbit poop whatever you get whatever you have a lot of times the guys who have rabbits will pay you to haul it off a lot of times the guys that have goats will pay you to haul it off or you can always make a trade as well we do a lot of bartering because we are Green business we do a lot of bartering which one get such on that briefly okay that's it burn food um okay ah this is out behind the warehouse and these are the storage bins that we have for our work food this is the coffee grounds and you guys can do this you guys can do this at home to attract the Florida nightcrawlers I found one of their eggs here's how small the worm eggs actually are and that's what one looks like notice the roundish amber color inside each one of these capsules is between five and twenty worms now I'm going to get in here and stir it around and you'll see our little friends in here and I know it's dark so you may not come up but what do you want it to but here's kind of an idea all these worms came naturally came right out of the ground if you notice the different sizes here you got the big guy here and you got the little guys here and that all and you can do the same thing on a small scale by putting your coffee grounds right out in this set in a section of the backyard or something and just leaving them there and you come back in the following morning and you'll have five or six worms underneath your coffee filter so that's just a little way of getting your old worms won't cost you a dime ah it's the goat poop that we get from the farms like I mentioned we also use cardboard all of our shipping containers all of our corrugated cardboard we use corrugated cardboard for a couple of reasons it's got these little sections in here and the worms get in here and raise the babies so it makes a good nursery for the worms also makes a good cover on the top because worms like it dark the darker it is the better it is if the way if there's any light they'll stop working so that's another thing to keep in mind you don't want to raise them in white bins or anything like that you want a darker color because you want it like I mentioned you want to keep it as dark as you possibly can in there another another thing that we do is we have an extra storage then right now we had season but generally in offseason this is filled with castings this is our this is our excess storage we can put about 2 tons in here and as you say as you can see we've had a busy season so there is none in there right now this is where we store the peat moss it's usually stored up to the roof and out we use regular connect we use Canadian peat moss you get it right down at Home Depot you probably wouldn't need nearly this much but we use 40-pound bales that's what we normally use in those big big bins but for you guys for you guys at home two or three two pound bag is more than adequate to do anything you could possibly need and you mix it in with your office paper and the corrugated cardboard and you got the bedding that you're looking for try them all that works the best okay out here in the carport where we make our warm tea which is a natural insecticide and fungicide is made from the earthworm castings you can use it in any size container but we usually use this 88 gallon water tank here and what we do is this is a regular laundry bag that you can get a Walmart for about three bucks we take a pound of the castings and fill it up about a pound and then you we take some alfalfa a handful of alfalfa put it in there zip it up we do is and what you can do we is use Grandma's molasses you get that right at Walmart we use six jars of grandma's molasses for the 88 gallons in here that's to give the microbes some food tea stir it around for a couple of days and then you have your worm tea and that's basically it we use a hundred percent rainwater which has a lot more trace elements than your standard than your standard city water or anything else and you can't use city water because it has boiling and fluoride in it which takes 24 hours to evaporate so you want to use your and if you use purified water it purifies a lot of your living microbes out of your water so you don't want that either so you want to use rainwater with you when you make worm tea it's kind of important and that's basically when it comes out of here is to concentrate and it's in the concentrated form when we bottle it up in the water bottles and the water bottles make usually about four gallons per 16 ounces of the concentrate that's how it works and there's 88 gallons of concentrate that we make it out of at a time out of here and that's basically it for the worm tea a lot of people it will say aerate them but here in the tropics we found if you aerate it too much you're going to overpopulate your microbes and they will eat all of your all of their food and you will just have brown water in the end so what we do is we do a cold filter process through the pump and it works very well as far as stabilizing the tea for the 90 days that we're looking for give it a shelf-life worm tea is important for a couple of things because worm tea will get rid of the things that are untreatable and will get rid of your spider mite go get rid of white flies black spot black mole tomato blight a lot of the things that your conventional sprays will not get rid of because it's a natural product and then and the microbes that are in here just come from the muck that come from inside the earthworm will attack these problems and they'll attack them naturally and it's not a synthetic that lays on the leaf it actually solves the problem at its source it won't kill your aphids only it'll kill the eggs that they lay as well so they won't come back and it's a very diverse product you can use it on everything from your bonsais to your pitcher plants to your orchids all the way down to your fruits and vegetables you can spray it on your crops and eat them to say there it is a hundred percent natural 100% organic and you can also treat everything like you'll see on the website that you can treat the things that are untreatable with this you can find us on the web at WWE worm farm com you

Channel: Dion HD Productions

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Id: DYQ7SRyKgpM

Length: 22min 14sec (1334 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 25 2014