MAKING HUMUS IN BELIZE AS A FERTILIZER FROM A WORM FARM

making humus using worms.
small scale worm farm for a learning tool.
Westbrook worm farm for making HUMUS.

ANOTHER NEEDED BELIZE ENTREPRENEURIAL INDUSTRY 2009 THE HUMUS MAKING INDUSTRY

Using worms to make humus is old hat. You can do it in your garage, tool shed, or in long rows on your milpa. Belize has a shortage of humus. Our soils are poor and most farming, particularly in clay, or Northern Belize, sugar cane fields, uses fertilizers heavily. Imported stuff. Humus using worms via the mixed compost clay soil method make a rich humus that is a fertilizer. It is 8 times stronger as a fertilizer than a bought bag of any imported sack of fertilizer. You can make it in Belize. Maybe you use it yourself, or you bag it and sell it. It takes about 10% of this worm made humus to make a poor soil, productive again. Maya can even do it on their milpas and reuse the same land over and over again. You would need a roto-tiller I expect, but you can do it with a hand hoe.

Worm farms either work by piled compost and soil, plus some worm starter. Which is available at Central Farm Organic vegetable section. I think they sell 2 pounds of California Red worms to make your own humus for $60 or so. The Chinese Taiwanese Mission also sell starter California Red worms. Basically in the small scale type of worm farming for your milpa, you use a container to collect the humus, which is the excrement from worms and is black and rich in nutrients. Over the top you have a screened container of mixed clay, soil and compost organic mixture and you dump in your worms. They reproduce and do not like light. In Cuba they use winrows of compost and soil and shade them on both sides from sunlight by banana plants and the worms burrow their way inside the pile. Anyway in the two tray screen method, you let the humus fall through the screen into the lower collector for shoveling out. When mixing with vegetable beds, or pots and bags of soil, about 10% of this humus is adequate for good vegetable production. There are previous articles on this blog about this.