The night shift: As fields comes back to life, so begins a new season of worm picking — the cash crop beneath our feet!
By Mel Luymes
At the John Deere dealership, the salesman asked what type of farming Nick Alafogiannis was into, livestock or cash cropping. Nick hesitated. On one hand, he does grow a crop. He’s a no-till guy and buys in manure. But on the other hand, he’s raising livestock in those fields – small, slippery livestock.
“I’m a worm farmer,” he tells the salesman, “I guess that would be a whole different category though.”
Nick is the owner of A1 Bait and sells worms to fishing bait shops around the world. About 700 million bait worms - Lumbricus terrestris, also known as dew worms, or the Canadian Nightcrawler – are sold annually worldwide and they were all harvested right here in Southwestern Ontario.
Nick grew up in the business. He was born and raised near Windsor and his parents had him picking worms when he was young. He jokes that the first money he made was when he was nine years old and a friend dared him to eat a worm. He did it.
“And you were hooked ever since,” says Bill Tenhove. You’ll remember Bill from the February issue. He is a manure contractor and has long-been applying manure and water for worm farmers. He was part of a small group of us that Nick toured around his Brussels facility in March.
But, back to Nick. He was born in Greece and his family immigrated to Canada in 1970. They started picking worms to get by. Nick left home when he was 16 years old and moved between Toronto and Windsor, farming worms. He has now settled near Wingham and runs A1 Bait based near Brussels, running the picking and processing. Nick’s son runs a facility near Toronto that does more of the packing and shipping.
Over the year, the operation provides about 100 jobs, either directly or indirectly. In many ways, it is seasonal work, but Nick has some employees all year round. Through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, he hires people – primarily from southeast Asia – on two-year contracts.
During the winter, they keep the worms alive in the Brussels facility, in a climate-controlled room. Stacked on the diagonal to give the worms air, open Styrofoam boxes are filled with moist peat moss, some corn fines for food and hold 500 worms each.
The worms are moved to new soil and corn fines every four weeks. That is what a dozen or so Laotian employees were doing the day we toured. They overturned the box on a workbench, picked all the worms into a new box and threw in a handful of corn fines (better known around here as “red dog”). Then they overturned the box of worms into another box of fresh peat, sourced near Ingersoll.
Left on the workbench are small clumps of digested peat, their manure, or what are called worm castings. Yes, worms eat the soil itself, further digesting the organic matter, and what is left is a different product entirely. Gardeners go crazy for worm castings, though Nick admits that he hasn’t had time to develop the market here yet.
The worms, on a fresh patch of peat moss, go back to the cold room. The room stays around three degrees to keep the worms dormant, and the light needs to stay on, Nick explains. Worms don’t like light, so they bury themselves in the soil. If someone left the room dark overnight, the worms would escape the boxes. But without the moist soil, they would have dried out on the concrete despite their best efforts. Worms don’t have lungs; they have oxygen exchanged through their skin and it needs to stay moist.
Nick knows his worms. He holds one up and gives us a lesson. What buyers want are healthy worms with a large band around them, he explains, because that is the easiest place to pierce with a hook.
The band is called a clitellum, and it is part of a worm’s reproductive system. It also indicates which side of the worm is the head. Each worm also has both male and female organs so they can mate with any other worm within their species, and they most often mate on the soil surface. When fertilized, worms make a cocoon with a few baby worms inside that will take a few weeks to hatch and then nearly a year to reach maturity. Nightcrawlers can live up to eight years, if they aren’t eaten, or their habitat isn’t disturbed. And if their tail end is cut or damaged, it is likely they can regenerate it. Nightcrawlers can produce 10 to 15 offspring a year, making them much slower to grow than the red wiggler for example.
From eight to ten inches long, Canadian Nightcrawlers are some of the largest worms we’ll find in this area. While smaller, red wigglers stay in the upper portions of the soil to break down organic matter, nightcrawlers burrow deep and prefer the cooler soils. They bring nutrients further into the soil profile and create macropores for drainage and soil aeration. You’ll know they are there because they make middens, small mounds of plant residue, soil and castings that cover the entrance to their burrows. A healthy field could have 10 to 15 middens per square foot, which is easily half a million worms per acre.
It is no wonder that Aristotle referred to earthworms as “the intestines of the earth.” Charles Darwin studied them for decades, detailing their role as tiny landscape engineers in 1881. While there is a fossil record of earthworms in North America, it is believed that they were wiped out by glaciers and that European settlers brought the species that we see here today. As important as they are, these earthworms are considered invasive, especially in forested areas where they outcompete other critters.
But, back to A1 Bait and you’re probably wondering why Nick doesn’t just grow worms indoors like other livestock. Don’t worry, the industry has tried, but with their relatively slow reproduction, it is more cost-effective to just create the ideal conditions for them to grow in the soil.
Worms need healthy soils, so ideal conditions for worm growing mean following the basic soil heath principles: zero disturbance, adding manures, and leaving crop residues or living crop on the surface.
“We used to pick in pastures and on golf courses,” says Nick, but as farming changed in Southwestern Ontario, so did the bait worm industry. He even remembers picking in fields of standing corn and beans, but Nick noticed that once the industry moved to glyphosate-resistant varieties, the worms virtually disappeared from cash-cropped fields.
These days, the best worm picking is from dairy farms and hay fields after four years of liquid manure applications and no-till. Instead of turning it back to corn, Nick rents from farmers fields for a year or two. The fields are scattered around the area to take advantage of different rains. And if it doesn’t rain, he’ll have to irrigate to bring the worms up from the deep. Bill TenHove says he typically spreads 6000 gallons of water on two acres, just as the sun is setting.
Nick buys about $100,000 worth of manure a year as well. Liquid dairy manure at a low rate works best to feed the worms, and he notes that – from hard-won experience – higher rates or more nutrient-rich manures can prevent the worms from coming up for a few months. While Nick typically rents a hay field for a year or two before a farmer puts it back into corn in the rotation – no worse for wear – there are also some fields he has picked for up to four years in a row. There really is no shortage of worms if one manages the field properly, he says.
For Nick, harvesting comes throughout the growing season, sometimes up to 20-25 nights in a month depending on the weather, picking hundreds of thousands of worms and up to 200 acres a night.
To pick nightcrawlers, you must become a night crawler yourself. A van pulls in and a crew slips silently into a dark, damp field wearing red headlamps, gloves and a bag of sawdust to keep their gloves from getting too slippery. They collect worms into tin cans, working quietly until dawn. The worms are collected into mesh bags and weighed; workers are paid piece-rates, and a good picker on a productive field can pick over 20,000 worms, making a few hundred dollars a night.
“They send about 75 percent of what they earn back home,” says Nick, noting how simply they live here. He provides housing for his employees in a few farmhouses in the area and helps them with transportation and groceries.
It isn’t easy managing employees, and foreign labour adds a whole new layer of complexity. The Temporary Foreign Worker Program is well-regulated in Canada, with minimum wage and housing standards, access to Ontario health care, regular inspections and government enforcement. Nick must complete a Labour Market Impact Assessment to first determine if there is labour available locally; there is a lot of paperwork involved with every employee.
But he simply can’t find local labour. It’s not easy work picking worms, says Nick. He knows. He has picked millions of worms in his day. Pickers need to bend over, squat or some are on their knees. They need to be still and quiet, and then quick to pick a worm, but gentle enough to not squish it.
There are only a few businesses in the industry supplying nearly the entire global market with bait worms, and all from Southwestern Ontario. Nick explains that it is the confluence of good soils, dairy farms and (usually) good rains, but – more importantly – it is the know-how and the global connections that have been forged here over decades in the industry.
As the soils warm up over this month, we’ll start seeing nightcrawlers popping up from their dormancy. They’ve survived the winter by burrowing down below the frost line. And soon enough, we’ll all be back in the fields.
So, if you’re driving late some summer night and see a peculiar field of slow-moving red lights please don’t honk! Just send a quiet wave to those working the night shift, with a deeper appreciation of one of our area’s most fascinating cash crops! ◊