Getting the Dirt : Soil Business Gives Worms Something to Chew On

Bill Enriquez and Richard Morhar run a business where their millions of employees gladly work seven days a week, 24 hours a day.

All that Enriquez and Morhar have to do is provide food for their workers: leaves, grass and tree clippings, brush, clean wood scraps and weeds. The workers are fat, red worms that industriously produce organic soil compost.

“We have happy worms,” Enriquez said.

For the past 15 years, Morhar, 45, has run the Worm Concern on about two acres of land on Erbes Road in Thousand Oaks where he lives. Two years ago, the 40-year-old Enriquez, who also lives in Thousand Oaks, joined the business.

At the Thousand Oaks site, the worms are grown and yard waste is recycled on a small scale. This is where local gardeners can buy worms, worm compost, soil additives and other products.

A month ago, the two men opened a 16-acre worm farm on Tierra Rejada Road, 1 1/3 miles east of the Moorpark Freeway in Simi Valley, where they take in compostable materials--such as leaves, clippings and brush--for a fee and produce their organic compost on a much larger scale. Already, the site has taken in about 5,000 cubic yards of such materials, Morhar said.

The new site, a little hard to reach because of the bumpy, sloped dirt road, sits directly below the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

“The library up there tends to make our worms a little more conservative, but they still do their job,” Enriquez joked.

The soil products produced at the Worm Concern begin with the grinding of the yard waste. Then, rows are made of the ground-up material, with soaking hoses on top. Once the material is soaked and becomes more compact, the worms are added.

“The worms eat through the organic matter and produce the compost,” Morhar said.

The more worms added to the yard waste--100 to 500 worms per square foot--the faster the compost is produced.

The worm compost is free of pesticides and contains live earthworms, worm droppings and composted manures. Gardeners can plant directly in the compost or mix it with soil additives.

The compost--which costs $5 for five gallons--can also be used for grass seeding, pre-sod application, planters and potted plants, flower and vegetable gardens, and trees. During times of drought, the compost is particularly important to keep the ground properly fed and moist, Morhar said. The Worm Concern also sells harvested worms for $7 per half-pound, which yields 500 to 800 worms.

Morhar said he began the business 15 years ago out of curiosity.

“I was around worms because of fishing,” Morhar said. “I started to garden organically and in the middle ‘70s, worms were a big fad. I bought a big box worth and everything started to grow like crazy. Just by using natural organic matter, the worms convert it to this wonderful humus.”

Morhar found that raising worms was relatively easy, since they need only food and water to propagate. The bigger problem, however, was marketing the worms.

“In the beginning,” Morhar said, “I was doing a lot of mail-order marketing in organic magazines, trying to market my worms. It took a year or two to realize that the byproduct of the worms was something that could be used in this area, where the soil is just terrible. It’s all clay or shale.”

While the purchase of the Simi Valley property was done to expand their compost-making business, it was also done to help divert even more materials from the local landfill.

“We thought of recycling a long while ago before it was a fad,” Enriquez said, “even before it was called recycling.”