Is worm poop the new Texas Tea?

Worms posing (and composting!) for the camera, originally uploaded by espeedy123.

A friend who knows of my worm hobby forwarded me a funny story related to worm castings that appeared in this month’s American Way magazine. That’s the one that’s on all AA flights. The most interesting part of it is the description of the process by which the entrepreneur subject of the story makes his organic fertilizer:

“BEFORE THE WORMS feast on it, their grub is composted and cooked in a vat. The food and the worms are placed together on a conveyor belt, creating a feeding frenzy that would make Homer Simpson sick with jealousy. “On one end, you put in cooked material, and the worms eat that, and [when it’s gone], they’ll move out of their own poop and into new food,” says Szaky. As the worms eat, the conveyor belt moves in the opposite direction of their travel at the pace of their ingestion, about an inch every five hours. “They’re on a perpetual conveyer belt — food at one end and poop out the other,” he says.”

Szaky’s company Terracycle is apparently making a fortune.