Mother Earth News always gets the gears turning in my head. Here’s a detailed essay from 1974 about their creation of a methane-producing anaerobic digester. One load of cow manure kept a gas-powered farm going for a few months, and even its waste provide useful to feed back into the soil. I’ll have to look at something like this if I ever own a homestead.
This site offers plenty of suggestions on building “flow through” vermicomposters (which should save plenty of time fiddling with screening out the worms) and has lots of good tips from people who are trying out new systems:
May i recommend you put the barrel on wheels before it gets too heavy. I put mine on a pre-made caster setup made to put tool boxes on. It was guaranteed to hold 2 thousand pounds. Got it at Harbor Freight for 20 Bucks.
Next I transferred all the contents of a 2 week old storage bin wormery (bedding, worms & food). I will cover all this with a wet, thin cotton sheet (cut up t-shirt) to discourage fruit flies
This was a useful how-to:
http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/verm/msg042040421641.html
I like these designs especially:
http://vermicomposters.ning.com/photo/albums/sues-96-gal-grey-monster-flow
http://vermicomposters.ning.com/forum/topics/my-new-flow-through-bin-with
http://vermicomposters.ning.com/photo/01-the-farm?context=user
A Dunkin’ Donuts in St. Petersburg, FL, has added an industrial-sized worm bin to its dumpster area, which it feeds with the waste from the coffee shop. That’s a big step up from the 3 Toronto Starbucks locations I visited this week; not a single one was aware of Grounds for the Garden. Come on, Starbucks! Get with the (corporate) program! My worms are jonesing for their caffeine fix!
http://www.ecobcil.com/blog/florida-dunkin-donuts-has-massive-solar-powered-worm-bin
Here’s an article on the founder of TerraCycle. This guy’s a personal hero of mine, as he mixes all of my favourite topics: environmentalism, entrepreneurialism, and savviness.
He learned about vermicomposting when a friend showed him the salutary effect worm castings had on pot plants, and has since built an empire based on the stuff others throw away.
TerraCycle collects organic waste to feed to their worms, whose castings and tea is sold in reused plastic bottles salvaged from the waste stream.
Szaky’s second “aha!” moment was “when we saw that the soda bottles people were discarding, or perhaps recycling, were also a perfectly good raw material. We had always been Dumpster diving for our office furniture, but that was the first time we realized that greatly expanding our Dumpster diving could fuel our production line. We had discovered that contemporary America is a vast Dumpster of industrial products that manufacturers are constantly throwing away or recycling — even when they’re in perfect condition.
One man’s trash is another man’s multi-million dollar fortune. More power to him!
http://www.princetoninfo.com/index.php?option=com_us1more&Itemid=6&key=05-13-2009%20terracycle