[00:00:00] Speaker A: Someone who's grown up, lived on a farm for 60 years, cares about that soil more than anybody else because that is their livelihood. But they also care about their family. They care about, about that livelihood. You cannot afford to pay for a premium product if it is going to sink your business, if it's going to cost you your farm, but it's also finding a way to manufacture it and price it so that a farmer can use it without breaking the bank. And if we can save that farmer 5, 10, even 20% on their fertilizer cost and give them better results and help them sleep a little better at night, knowing that their soil is going to last another 50 years, then you have something that is actually going to make a difference.
[00:00:39] Speaker B: As most of you know, we have a regenerative farm and we grow all kinds of animals on our regenerative farm.
Today's guest is going to be talking about a totally different kind of animal than what we grow.
[00:00:54] Speaker C: Yeah, well, we grow them, but we.
Well, we hope they're out there.
[00:00:58] Speaker B: I hope.
Welcome to the Dust or Mud podcast. My name is Rich and I'm shelly.
[00:01:04] Speaker C: Hey. After 25 years of being in the Air Force, we started that farm. But before he was in the Air Force, we were at the University of Central Florida in Orlando going to school. And actually, our guest today hails from.
[00:01:18] Speaker B: Our alma mater, University of Central Florida. Today we would like to welcome Sam Baker. He is the CEO of Wriggle Brew.
And one of the things that caught our attention immediately was that you won a competition at the University of Central Florida and that really kicked things off. Would you start there and tell us who you are and what you do?
[00:01:44] Speaker A: Absolutely. So thank you for having me on. I'm absolutely honored to be talking about worms today.
My business, Wriggle Brew, that's what we do. We do earthworm fertilizer, primarily the liquids variety. So taking earthworm poop and brewing it, hence our name, into a fertilizer for people.
And yeah, back in 2022, we were, we were a startup, and we still are a startup in many ways, but we were a brand new startup that came out of some research we did at the University of Central Florida to make a new kind of fertilizer. We were really concerned about fertilizer because there was a lot of fertilizer runoff, nitrogen and phosphorus runoff in Florida at the time. And it was killing a lot of our favorite fishing spots. It was killing a lot of places where, you know, there were. There used to be a lot of life. There used to be a Lot of activity. And now there's. There's nothing because some new housing development would be put up and they would just totally decimate the ground with some and hyponia or something like this.
So me and my friends decided, okay, well, there's got to be a better way to fertilize. And of course, we ended up going kind of down the wormhole and learning about all these other organic fertilizer methods. And the most promising ones seem to be worm castings.
Worm castings, you know, can be made very easily. You take earthworms and you give them some kind of manure or some kind of organic material to eat. They chew through it, and they poop out a really rich fertilizer material, One that, pound for pound, is completely unrivaled by any other substance. And if you brew a liquid, a worm tea from worm castings, the growth results you get from that are competitive or better than what you get from things like nitrogen or phosphorus fertilizers.
[00:03:32] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:03:33] Speaker A: Wow. It's really amazing. But no one is really using it for the most part.
It's a very niche market. So the question is why?
Why, if this solution exists and it's competitive with all the nitrogen phosphorus fertilizer, is it not being used? And it's not really because there's some, you know, like, conspiracy to stop the use of worm tea. It's really because worm tea has not been made practical for the farmer. The worm teas that were available on the market in 2022 all had a shelf life of less than 48 hours.
[00:04:04] Speaker B: Oh, wow.
[00:04:04] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:04:05] Speaker A: Yes.
And compost tea is actually the same way today. So composty, if you try, if you make a liquid out of it, you cannot ship that liquid to anybody without it going bad really, really quickly.
[00:04:17] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:04:18] Speaker A: And if you try and ship the solid compost to the farmer and then ask them to have their own, you know, liquid compost production facility on site, that really limits your customer base, and it makes the buy in a lot more difficult.
[00:04:31] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:04:32] Speaker A: A lot of farmers, they want to just get something in that they can immediately put into their system and use. They don't want to have to process raw materials and learn an entire new production methodology.
So Gabe, my best friend at the time, who's my. My co partner, who's my co founder in the business, he and I were like, okay, well, there's got to be a way to make worm tea shelf stable. There's got to be a way to make it practical and useful for farmers. And so I know you guys are in the milk industry.
We ended up kind of taking some inspiration from Louis Pasteur, precisely his process, but the idea of making it more shelf stable by kind of sterilizing it. Now, of course, in both milk and worm teeth, this can be a problem. If you sterilize this, you're getting rid of a lot of healthy bacteria and microbes.
Well, for us, we decided we'll sterilize it. So we make it a controlled environment, and then we'll take the microbes we want, breed them on the side, and we will put them in a state of hibernation and add only those guys back in.
So essentially what we're doing is we're, we're clearing the slate of the worm tea, making it totally inorganic and, or rather in non biological. And then we're adding back in the microbial life once it's put into a state of hibernation. And that takes the shelf life from 24 to 48 hours up to two and a half years.
[00:05:54] Speaker B: Oh, wow.
[00:05:54] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:05:55] Speaker A: Which is amazing because that means you could actually ship it to a farmer and he could use it on, or not use it for an entire season and still be ready to go, you know, the next season.
[00:06:04] Speaker B: Yeah, that's awesome. We, we do produce raw milk, so we're very aware of, of that whole process and, and are following right along with you. Keep going. This is great stuff.
[00:06:13] Speaker A: Yeah. Because. So Lou, Louis Pasteur wanted milk to be, you know, something people could drink without getting sick. And the only way he could think to do that was to kill everything in it. And, you know, that's, that's straightforward, it makes sense.
And you know, we can do the same thing for worm tea. It does still work. It has all the humic acid, the fulvic acid. It still has all these good things that are, that are non biological.
But if you really want it to be worm tea, if you really want it to be the best that it can be, it's got to have that microbial life. So for us figuring out how to keep the microbes in there without having them compete with each other, without having them eat all the stuff, that was the, that was the big technical challenge.
[00:06:50] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:06:50] Speaker A: And once we figured that out, we did a bunch of testing and we got a few local farms. I say local, like people down in Bradenton and people in Oviedo to try it, which if you're from Florida, that's not super near Orlando, but you know.
[00:07:05] Speaker C: It'S still in the area.
[00:07:06] Speaker B: We got it.
[00:07:07] Speaker A: So we got them to try it and they Loved it. They thought it was amazing. They sent us a huge amount of pictures and data and, you know, all these good results. And so we said, wow, okay, this is awesome. Let's. Let's make a business out of this. And then that turned out to be a lot harder than.
[00:07:25] Speaker B: Yeah, I think we're squarely about right there right now.
[00:07:28] Speaker C: The learning curve.
[00:07:29] Speaker B: Yes, the farming part's fun and now the business part.
[00:07:34] Speaker A: It's that translation that is really difficult. But ucf, our alma mater, because I was a senior at the time, had a competition called the joust.
Because UCF's all night themed, everything is nights. So the Joust is a competition between students and alumni with businesses or business ideas.
And there's a $15,000 grand prize. And of course, we have 60,000 students, so a lot of people can enter.
[00:08:01] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[00:08:02] Speaker A: And in our team, or in our year rather, we had about 80 teams enter, I think maybe slightly more.
And of those 80, I think 60 actually made it to the first round. And then they narrow it down to 16 and. And then they narrow it down to 4, and then there's a grand prize winner. And there was a team there that was doing rocket engines, there was a team with drones, there was a team with Google and Microsoft backing, and then there was us, the worm poop guys.
But we took the grand prize.
[00:08:32] Speaker B: That's awesome.
[00:08:33] Speaker C: That's awesome.
[00:08:34] Speaker A: It was really, really cool. It was one of the greatest moments of my life, to be fully honest. And all my friends and family were there to see it. And it was a great, great moment, but it also was like, okay, we're doing this for real now. You know, we've got money. There's no excuse. You got to really try.
So we, we gave it our best shot. We started getting a few local nurseries, started getting to a few local farms, figuring out how production works.
And we happened to make friends with a local philanthropist who owns the barbecue restaurant chain that's well known in Orlando.
John Rivers. He owns the. The Four Rivers barbecue chain.
[00:09:12] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:09:13] Speaker A: And he's a big fan of ucf and he's a big fan of what we were doing to help the soil.
And so he helped us get a small warehouse space and at his. At actually at his warehouse where he stores a lot of the stuff for all his restaurants because he had some extra space in there. So very, very cheap lease we got from him and that allowed us to start producing. We met a couple big farm distributors. And this last year, I'm happy to report, we've sent out 30,000 gallons of fertilizer.
[00:09:43] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:09:43] Speaker A: Wow. A huge amount. That's enough to, to cover many, many thousands and thousands of acres.
[00:09:49] Speaker C: I was going to ask you how many acres would that handle? 30, 000 gallons.
[00:09:52] Speaker A: It really depends on how you use it, but I think we're averaging a use of about 30 ounces to the acre right now.
[00:09:59] Speaker B: Oh, wow.
[00:10:00] Speaker A: So hey, we were.
[00:10:02] Speaker C: That was going to be a question.
[00:10:03] Speaker B: We got to get into that here in a minute.
[00:10:05] Speaker C: Yeah, we'll get into that.
[00:10:06] Speaker B: You've also somehow, if my research is correct, you fig you navigated the treacherous waters of USDA grants and were able to come up with some, some pretty big, big dollars from other places too. Yeah.
[00:10:23] Speaker A: Yes, we were. So yeah, usda actually, USDA was for us easier than a few of the other agencies.
So we, we ended up getting funding from UCF like I said, but we also got fundamental funding from the state of Florida. There was a governor's cup competition.
We also got funding from the city of Orlando and also from the National Science Foundation. That was the big one.
National Science foundation and the USDA both funded us six figure grants. We won $125,000 from the USDA in an SBIR grant.
It's a small business innovation research grant. And these are really helpful because they are all about funding research that your business is working on to make it profitable, to make it effective. So that can pay for salaries, that can pay for equipment, that can pay for travel and facilities and a lot of this other cool stuff.
And the same thing with the National Science foundation, the NSF grant.
The NSF we won $275,000 from.
And both of these were related to research projects when we were first starting the business on how to commercialize the use of worms. So with the USDA we were working on a special variety of worm powered composter.
And with the NSF we were working on using the worms to not just make fertilizer, but to actually digest certain kinds of plastic waste.
[00:11:53] Speaker B: Because.
[00:11:53] Speaker A: Because, yes. And it's very interesting because it turns out that worms are not just digesters of leaf litter and manure. They can also eat plastic in some circumstances.
[00:12:05] Speaker B: Oh wow.
[00:12:06] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:12:07] Speaker A: And we can talk about that a little bit more. But that was something that was really amazing to us. So we decided to pursue it in research and it got us some funding. And between these sources of funding and with some, some sales, some limited sales we were doing to, to garden shows, so we would set up a six foot table, you know, and be out there, we know You've been there, I'm sure.
[00:12:31] Speaker C: Although to me, the, the fact that you were able to get the grants from these national organizations, it tells me two things. One, we've got problems.
[00:12:41] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:12:42] Speaker C: And two, you have a solution.
And they recognize that.
[00:12:45] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:12:46] Speaker C: And the, those, those two things, that's how we get to where you're headed.
[00:12:52] Speaker B: Innovation.
[00:12:53] Speaker C: Innovation. You know, that's how we get to things that are better.
Because things need to change.
[00:12:58] Speaker B: Yeah, they do.
[00:12:59] Speaker A: And, and I think that a lot of people these days are very much focused on awareness. They're focused on discussing the problems. They're focused on. There's, there's a lot of analysis and reanalysis of what's gone wrong and trying to figure out all the things that are not working.
[00:13:14] Speaker C: Like we can see the problems, but start, let's start coming up with some solutions.
[00:13:19] Speaker A: Yeah. At a certain point, you know, we kind of have to put our nose to the grindstone and actually work on solutions. So.
[00:13:25] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:25] Speaker A: Trying to find alternatives that, that work. And we were talking about this a little bit before we started.
This is a huge problem in the organic fertilizer space because a lot of people got so caught up in making organic fertilizers that they, they charge, they charge a premium for organic fertilizers. They, you know, as a farmer, you want to go organic because you care about your soil. We were saying this earlier. You know, farmers care more about their soil than basically anybody else.
[00:13:50] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:13:51] Speaker A: I don't. You could be a journalist in New York and, you know, write environmental op EDS every weekend. But if you've never been to a farm, you've never actually held soil in your hand, you probably don't have much of an idea of what it is you're writing about.
[00:14:02] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:14:03] Speaker A: Someone who's grown up, lived on a farm for 60 years, cares about that soil more than anybody else, because that is their livelihood. But they also care about their family. They care about that livelihood. You cannot afford to pay for a premium product if it is going to sink your business, if it's going to cost you your farm. They operate on very, very thin margins.
So you have all these organic options, but they end up costing more than the synthetic nasty stuff. So what do you use? Use the stuff that's going to keep your family alive.
[00:14:33] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:14:35] Speaker A: So for us, yes, the problem, it was creating a solution that was a shelf stable worm tea, because that's effective. But it's also finding a way to manufacture it and price it so that a farmer can use it without breaking the Bank. And if you can save that farmer, you know, 5, 10, even 20% on their fertilizer cost and give them better results and help them sleep a little better at night, knowing that their soil is going to last another 50 years, then you have something that is actually going to make a difference, sells itself too. Yes. And that is a bigger technical challenge than just making something you can slap an Omri label on.
[00:15:12] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:15:13] Speaker A: And it's good to have Omri. We've got it. But you know, it's also good to have something that a farmer is relieved or happy to use.
[00:15:22] Speaker B: Yeah. We just did a podcast last week and the, the genesis or the, the foundation of that podcast is that farmers Most all like 96% have off farm jobs to support the farm. And the, the average or the median income for a farmer in the United States is negative $900 annually.
So you know, when, when your median income for all farms across the United States negative $900. You're absolutely right in saying that a, your standard farmer cannot afford the premium organic product.
So I applaud you for even trying to come up with a solution that is better for everyone at an affordable price. And not only have you tried, you're actually succeeding.
[00:16:15] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:16:15] Speaker B: This is amazing.
[00:16:17] Speaker A: I think it's, I don't, it makes me sad, you know, because it should be common sense. We should, we companies, corporations, manufacturers, everyone should be trying to help the farmers out because we don't eat if we don't have farmers. We don't have a civilization if we don't have farmers. Our entire country was built from the time of Thomas Jefferson to today on being able to be self sufficient, to have an agrarian backbone to it.
Even the concept of a farmer who owns his own land and operates almost like his own fief or settlement, that's one of the basis of self determination. It's into our constitution.
So we should be dedicated to helping that out because that's our soul as a country. And in 2022, ironically, when we were starting this business, we had a huge problem occur in agriculture because we had the war in Ukraine begin.
[00:17:10] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:17:10] Speaker A: And when that war started, the price of fertilizer skyrocketed.
[00:17:15] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:17:16] Speaker A: And it put a lot of farms out of business. It led to a lot of fields rotting. It led to all kinds of really horrible outcomes. In some cases, the price went up like 400%. And that's just. What can you do with that? You can't do anything with that. And it's because we have made ourselves dependent on Fertilizers that come from petroleum, anhydrous ammonia, nitrogen fertilizers, those are all produced from natural gas.
And natural gas isn't the worst thing in the world. But when natural gas is coming from Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan and Russia and those countries are cut off from us for one reason or another, where does our fertilizer come from now?
[00:17:54] Speaker B: Yeah, it doesn't.
[00:17:56] Speaker A: It doesn't. And if you can't make your fertilizer here, you can't make your food here.
[00:18:00] Speaker B: Yep.
And so you might concern all of us.
[00:18:03] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:18:04] Speaker C: Yeah, that should concern everyone.
[00:18:05] Speaker A: Yeah, it's same thing with tractors. Same thing with the, you know, the plastic components we use in, like, all the different parts of the farm, all those things. If you cannot make those here, you might as well be importing your food because you're just as vulnerable if those things get cut off.
[00:18:21] Speaker B: That's right. So you take the food that you're already importing and then you add to it the fact that you're importing all the things that it takes to grow your own food and. And you have the majority of your food literally being imported.
[00:18:33] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I mean, how much of our food is truly, when you really get down to it, domestic.
[00:18:39] Speaker B: Yeah, not much.
[00:18:40] Speaker C: Not much.
[00:18:41] Speaker A: Almost none. And that is an enormous strategic weakness, a national weakness we gotta be concerned about. So one of the great things about a worm tea, about. About composting is it's a way to take food and farm waste and. And turn that back into calories again. And so it allows for more domestic production of fertilizer. Every part of how our fertilizer is made, wriggle brew is made, is made here in the US Is made in Florida. We don't import the worm. Worms are from a local worm farmer. We don't import the food waste. A lot of it comes from grocery stores and nearby farms and stuff like that, and even just lawns. We don't import any of that. It all comes from around here. So that makes it a lot easier when bad things happen. For example, the tariff situation right now, a lot of fertilizers cut off from Canada.
Well, ours is not. Our fertilizer is now able to be sold. Not only we're selling it cheaper than what these synthetics are selling it for, but we are now an option that is not affected by these trade wars. So having that is another extremely critical part of this. Beyond the fact that it's good for the soil, beyond the fact that it's more affordable. It's just that it comes from Here.
[00:19:52] Speaker B: So let's go a little bit deeper into the science of the whole thing.
We've called it fertilizer and we've said it's good for the soil. Take us a little bit deeper into that. Like, compare it to a NPK that we're used to. Compare it to the results of spreading NPK on our pastures or on our fields.
Let's give us a little bit of a deep dive into what it actually is and then add a comparison to what we are more familiar with.
[00:20:24] Speaker A: Absolutely. So, and that's, that's a really important point to make. Why, why does worm tea work? Why is it, why is it so good? Yeah, well, it, it's a mixture of a couple things, but worm tea itself chemically is composed of mostly humic and fulvic acids dissolved in water and a host of chelated plant defensive compounds, plant signaling hormone molecules, and a good number of chelated micronutrients as well.
[00:20:53] Speaker C: Okay, yes, stop right there. Those are really fun words, but talk to me like I'm in eighth grade.
[00:21:00] Speaker A: Sure. Okay. Okay.
So, so worm tea is, it's full of essentially the very kinds of nutrients you look for in healthy humus and healthy soil and healthy topsoil. So earthworms, their entire ecological niche is to take material and recycle it into new food for plants. They do this because when earthworms have healthy plants around them, it's more food for them. They like to eat leaf litter. It's more food for their children as well, for their next generation. So earthworms have all these special mechanisms in their gut to both assist in the growth of plants and to assist in the production of nutrients that help plants grow.
A big component that is humic acid. Okay, what we, where we get humus from? Humic acid is a very, very large molecule composed of carbon and nitrogen and a bunch of other things. And it provides a host of nutritious properties to plants. It's slightly negatively charged, which means it's good at bringing in certain metal ions and other things to plants that they need.
And it's also really, really good at making the soil physically able to support better moisture, better aeration, and it also supports better microbial life.
On top of that, earthworms also produce a mixture of bacteria and fungi that are really, really good for plants. So they carry these living microorganisms around inside their gut.
A big one they carry, for example, is Bacillus subtilis. It's a very famous bacteria.
And this bacteria, when the worms move around plant roots and Kind of poop it around those roots, ends up colonizing those roots and forming root nodules that produce nitrogen for the plant.
So we all know that plants kind of need nitrogen. They need it to produce protein, they need it to produce chlorophyll. So very important things for a plant to live.
But plants are not meant to get anhydrous nitrogen and ammonia. That's. That's not something they naturally come across, right? When they are healthy and they're doing well in nature.
[00:23:03] Speaker B: They.
[00:23:04] Speaker A: They have a series of bacterial allies that bring this nitrogen into them.
And a lot of our soil does not have that here in the US because we've spent decades kind of sterilizing and killing our soil.
So we don't have a lot of good bacterial life.
But worm tea is a concentrated formulation that has not only those bacteria in it, but also the compounds to support the growth and development of those bacteria.
So when you use it on a plant, you're getting those bacteria back into your soil, you're getting nitrogen fixation back, and you're also getting compounds that help those bacteria stick around.
And there's one final thing to worm tea. I mean, there are a few more elements, but one final thing that I think is worth really, really talking about, and that is that worm teas are also full of what are called defensive compounds.
So, like, if you've ever eaten a hot or spicy pepper or pepper plant or something like that, it has this burning sensation when you eat it, and that comes from capsaicin. Capsaicin is one of a family of thousands of compounds known as polyphenols. And polyphenol compounds are defensive compounds plants produce, because when something like a mealba or mealybug or a spider mite bites into a plant and gets a mouthful of capsaicin, you know, for us, it makes it spicy. For them, it makes it deadly. At their scale, a little bit of capsaicin just destroys their entire intestinal tract or causes their mandibles to fall off.
So when earthworms come across capsaicin, they don't get a spicy sensation. In fact, they have a special enzyme called a surfactant enzyme that wraps itself around the capsaicin like a blanket and prevents it from even being digested. And so when the worms inevitably poop the capsaicin out, they deposit it in the soil so that the seeds and young plants around there have all of these landmines of capsaicin or other polyphenol compounds around them in the soil. So that when other bugs and parasites try to get to them. They have to go through not only the defenses of that living plant, but all the defenses of the dead plants that came before it.
And when you take that and put it in a worm tea, the capsaicin can be sprayed onto the plant, and so can other defensive compounds. So tannins that make acorn bitter and, you know, caffeic acid, that's what makes caffeine kind of bitter. So all these different compounds that end up in the worm tea, and when you spray them on a plant, it. It enwraps the plant in this kind of active shield. And what we have seen is that it's. That shield is not only enough to help keep plants healthier, but it's enough to drive off infestations of things like spider mites and mealybugs and even aphids.
And so you have a fertilizer that also ends up acting kind of like a biopesticide, and that makes a huge, huge difference.
[00:25:46] Speaker B: That's really cool. I've seen you say before. I think that may even eliminate the need for pesticides potentially.
[00:25:55] Speaker A: And, of course, the more products like this are used, the harder it is for bugs to get a toehold on a farm.
And that's the thing. So plants rely on a kind of collective defense. They communicate with one another through the use of things like methyl jasminate, which is a. It's a gaseous compound they emit to warn each other when they're being attacked. And they do that because when the plants nearby them, when their defenses are also on alert, when they're also producing these polyphenol compounds, then the. It's very hard for bugs to eat and successfully breed and repopulate and grow in population. And in fact, when that defense is really strong, they start to shrink in population, and eventually they just cannot. They cannot actually get a toehold at all.
[00:26:40] Speaker C: So it's seriously equivalent to one in working on our own microbiome, in our guts, that we've learned about, you know, in the past 10 years, and increasing the immune system of the. The farm like you're. You're actually increasing its ability to fight off its own problems.
[00:27:04] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:27:05] Speaker A: Exactly. And that's what's most important, because all these other synthetic solutions where, whether we're using synthetic fertilizer, synthetic defense, we're kind of coddling our plants. And as a result, they. They become kind of infirm and weak and vulnerable when they are used to getting their food in the form of a. Essentially a steroid, which is what synthetic fertilizer can be analogized to. And when they're used to being in a sterile environment, they never develop an immune system capable of fighting off pests and diseases.
[00:27:37] Speaker C: Well, sounds like humans too. Yeah, we've gone from sterilization over the past 25 years where we eked into sterilization, you know, between hand sanitizer and. Everything has to be so clean to realize the bugs within our human, within our biology really matter. The good stuff.
And trying to add some of that back. Yes, the, the ground is, is the same. We've sterilized it and now it can't survive on its own. And this is adding that biology. It's basically feeding your garden kimchi. Sorry? I like to say funny things, but, you know, we need to feed our garden some kimchi.
[00:28:16] Speaker A: It's kind of like kimchi. I mean, it's even spicy too, right?
[00:28:20] Speaker C: Wow, this is so cool.
[00:28:22] Speaker B: So at the, at the garden level then it, we have a, a 30 by 50 foot garden. Like, wow, are we, like I've, are we talking a little bit or is it gallons and gallons? Like how, how often? How much? How often? Like if we wanted to. For us, we've got our, our small garden, but then we've also got about 80, 90 acres of, of grazing pasture, you know, and I'm, I'm interested. You got me. So let like give me the sales pitch. What buy, you know, Right. Like, because there, there are people that watch and listen to the podcast that are, are with us in small gardens and in large pastures, you know, like, and, and I'm, I gotta say I'm, I'm interested.
[00:29:12] Speaker A: So we've, we have provided it to a number of farms that do grazing because it's very important to have good quality grass and things for, for the cattle or for, you know, whatever herd you have to eat.
And so it is a really good product for that. And the use rate, like I said, it's about roughly 30 ounces to the acre. So that's basically a quart per acre, more or less.
So for four acres, you're talking about about a gallon roughly.
So for 90 acres, you know, you're talking about 25, 23ish gallons of, of stuff, which is really not all that much. It's less than a 55 gallon drum.
And for a garden, of course, 30 by 50 bed, that's, you know, that's, that is a pretty big garden bed.
But it's, it's still something that's very, you know, within the range of a single gallon can cover that.
Now we, we tend to recommend, it's best to use when you're, when you're starting with plants, when they're at even the seed stage, because it's really, really good for increasing germination and like an inoculant, it's really good to get it on the plant young because that plant's immune system will benefit for the rest of its life.
But for plants that are already established, it's definitely something that, that really makes a big difference. So we have a lot of farmers using it on soy and corn and they're seeing the yields go up, they're seeing drought resistance increase, stress resistance increase.
And in some cases, you know, we're talking about double digit yield increases.
[00:30:43] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:30:44] Speaker A: Compared to synthetic fertilizers. And so all of that has been achieved by, by using it kind of within like a regular watering schedule. So when you're watering the, when you're watering these plants, you're, you're including the diluted mixture of the, of the concentrated wriggle brew.
And it seems to be making a really, really big difference in a lot of these farms.
For cattle, there's a really interesting point to be made. For herds, there's a really interesting point which is that when you, when you're talking about the biomass of the cattle or the herd or the goats or the sheep that are living above ground, they actually need to be, to be sustainable, they need an equivalent biomass of earthworm or other decomposer below the ground in the same area to support the growth of the grass necessary to feed them. So when you think about your herd, whether it's goat or sheep or cattle, if you have 80 tons of them above ground, you need at least 80 tons of earthworms under the same ground, which means you actually have two herds. You have an entire second herd that you don't even think about because it's out of sight. But that herd is extremely critical. And maintaining the health of that herd maintains the health of the field, which maintains the health of the cattle. And it's not just whether or not there's grass there to eat, it's the quality of the grass that's being produced, it's the quality of the greens there's. And that's shaped by the decomposers you have under the ground.
[00:32:14] Speaker B: That's cool.
[00:32:15] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:32:16] Speaker A: But it's also one of the big crises in all this because we're killing off a lot of the earthworms that we have in our fields and in our pastures.
And by spraying stuff on them, by Spraying. Exactly. And especially we see this in Florida because every time you put up a new housing development, we clear cut through whatever brush and trees there are there. We throw down a bunch of sod and we cut up the field by putting up big patches of concrete and asphalt. Earthworms cannot pass through. So they become isolated in these tiny little patches of grass where they get poisoned and solarized. And so you end up basically nuking an entire region of earthworms. And when that happens, it takes a very long time for them to come back. And they can only come back really, if there are places that have shade and have adequate food and lack of poison to support them.
[00:33:06] Speaker C: Well, well, yeah, none, none of us really grasp the importance of the earthworm and what's going on below. Yeah, below ground.
[00:33:17] Speaker B: I mean, we, we, we think about it, but like when we've talked about it, it's, it don't like to deworm our animals because of the fact that now the, the manure that they're pooping out is going to kill worms instead of, you know, for some period of, feed them for a period of time. And so like, that's one of the things we, we strongly resist deworming our animals unless it's just absolutely necessary.
So like, we think of it like that. But I have not thought of it as.
This is what's actually supporting the, the whole foundation of the farm.
[00:33:58] Speaker C: Right?
[00:33:58] Speaker A: It is. And it's, it's supporting a lot of the foundation of the earth. I mean, I say earthworms, but there are other organisms that fill similar roles. But when you don't have those organisms, what happens is you end up with sand, you end up with a desert.
So top soil doesn't. Topsoil is not something that's just miraculously appearing. It's something that has to be produced.
It is the result of these biochemical engines, these worms moving through soil over generations. It's why in Europe we used to, you know, many centuries ago in the medieval era, we used to let fields sit fallow. We would let them, we would cycle through four, and one of those four would be sitting fallow for 25 or 30 years. And it was so that it could regenerate. And we don't do that anymore. And we expect the soil to just magically regenerate on its own.
But when, when there is poison in the soil, when there is constant taking of calories, when we're, when we're harvesting calories by cutting material down, shipping it elsewhere and not letting new calories be put there to decay.
We don't have that regeneration of humus. And that means in the long run we are setting ourselves up for desertification.
[00:35:12] Speaker B: Oh yeah.
[00:35:13] Speaker C: So switching gears just a little bit, you started out very small startup in a very small lease area. Let's talk about this all sounds amazing, but we got to talk about scalability.
Doing it in a, you know, in your bathtub kind of deal is one thing.
Scaling it to where we can get this on our nation's farms is another.
So let's talk about how you guys are scaling and is it, is it possible?
[00:35:46] Speaker A: Absolutely. So we actually started in my garage.
[00:35:50] Speaker B: Nice.
[00:35:51] Speaker A: Well, I should say my mom's garage.
[00:35:53] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:35:54] Speaker A: It's my mom's garage where we were first doing real production and in my, my dorm closet where we were first doing our real tests.
But we started at that scale not with the bathtub, but with a, we had a 55 gallon drum cut in half, so very similar to a bathtub.
And we were able to produce enough for a garden show every weekend.
Then when we wanted to start selling it more because we, you know, you're starting to get some farms and nurseries interested. We scaled up to, to our leased area within John Rivers warehouse within the four routes location.
And at first we were using a handful of barrels and then it went from a handful of barrels to we got a 2,000 gallon tank.
And then we eventually figured out a way to actually expedite the process even more with, by kind of copying how coffee production is done with some of that sort of techniques.
And so now we're at a scale where we can produce about a thousand to two thousand gallons a day at the moment, which is a lot. Yeah, we're still doing a lot of it very manually. So we're still physically shoveling worm castings into the system. We're still physically, you know, by hand pressing buttons and activating machinery. And so there's a lot of limitation because of that. And we've recently designed a new system which we're going to be setting up in Missouri very, very soon will be able to produce more than 5,000 gallons a day, possibly 10,000 gallons a day, and will be very, very automated.
And this system we're hoping to have online for this next season because this, this just, just this past season between February and and April, we produce 30,000 gallons here in Florida next year in this between to sell on that in that same season, we're aiming to produce 300,000 gallons.
And we have the technology, we know how to do it.
We're going to be physically building all that out in the coming months. But I think it's very, very doable based on all of the calculations and experiments we've done. So it is a very scalable process. And of course, as we scale it, the price goes down. That makes it even more affordable. And so we are hoping to be selling this at a lower price next year even than we are now by a little bit. And we're hoping to be producing volumes of it, you know, 10 times the quantity we did this year. And what's great about the way all this works is because it's all worm castings you can have as long as you have a local worm farm that's taking some kind of manure or compost or whatever to recycle and produce those castings. The rest of the technology is fairly simple. And so it could be, it's a system that could be almost franchise. It could be done throughout the country and even potentially outside the country.
So it could be something that we could bring to Africa, for example.
Cyclical famine is a huge, huge problem.
In Malawi, for example, there is zero domestic fertilizer production. None. They don't produce any of any kind practically maybe small amounts of compost here and there. And as a result, they're entirely dependent on shipments of fertilizer from China and from Chinese, Chinese merchants, and from, from Russia and a few of these other countries. And those guys sell it at a premium and they only sell it when they have extra excess supply, which means Malawi is getting fertilizer some years and then not getting it other years and just this constant cycle of starvation is happening as a result. Well, if we, the United States could go over to them with a system like ours where they can make their own fertilizer, they can get, you know, take their food and farm waste, take their effluent waste and turn it into manure and turn that into fertilizer for their farms. Not only would they not be dependent on buying things from our enemies, they would probably be very grateful to us and they would be in a much better situation where they wouldn't be suffering from cyclical starvation.
And so, yeah, it's a self sustaining system that, that could be set up almost anywhere.
[00:40:08] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:40:08] Speaker A: So that's the dream is not only have this be something that can produce fertilizer for our country and make us more independent and make us more profitable for our farmers, but it could be something we could export to other countries to improve their situation and to disconnect them from relying on countries that they shouldn't need to.
[00:40:29] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And you're exporting the technology, not just the gallon of. Of product. So it's not, you know, you're actually teaching them how to fish, not giving them a fish.
[00:40:38] Speaker A: Exactly. And that. That makes them more self sustaining, and that makes them more capable of weathering these cycles of cyclical, you know, starvation or trade wars or. Or whatever else happens in the world.
[00:40:49] Speaker B: Right.
[00:40:50] Speaker C: Reducing their reliance on other global entities to, To. To help them.
[00:40:55] Speaker B: So let's take that little detour we talked about a few minutes ago and go into what you can actually feed worms, types of plastic. And they poop out worm castings. Yeah.
[00:41:07] Speaker A: Yes.
So I wish I had discovered this phenomenon myself, but this is something that was actually known about for. For a little while.
In fact, Stanford did a whole thing on this. But certain kinds of larval worms, whether it's mealworms, black soldier fly larvae, things like that will, when they are starving, when they are very, very hungry, if they are around polystyrene plastic, they will eat it and digest it, and they will. They can survive off of it for months or even a year at a time, not longer than a year, because their lifecycle doesn't go farther than that, but they can basically live off of it and pupate and do their whole lifecycle based on just polystyrene, which is really, really amazing.
And polystyrene plastic is a big problem. It's, you know, in some cases as much as 25% of landfill volume in many places. It's a huge part of the Pacific Garbage Patch, and it's one of the worst plastics for forming microplastic and for becoming a toxin to humans.
[00:42:03] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:42:04] Speaker A: So it raised the.
The same question in us as worm tea raised when we were first starting, which is if worms can eat garbage, and then in this case, if they can eat worm. If worms can eat plastic, why are we not doing that?
[00:42:21] Speaker B: Right.
[00:42:22] Speaker A: Why isn't there a big warehouse?
[00:42:24] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[00:42:26] Speaker A: I'm sorry, Shelley, what were you gonna say?
[00:42:27] Speaker C: No, I said, that's a great question.
[00:42:29] Speaker B: Great question. Yeah.
[00:42:29] Speaker C: And. And I'm thinking through yes, on the plastic and with the food. I mean, there's a statistic that over half of the food in this country is wasted. So there's so much.
[00:42:41] Speaker B: So you're saying we were making worm food already?
[00:42:43] Speaker C: We're already making worm food simply because 50% of the food isn't. Is wasted.
And if we could collect that. Feed the worms.
My mind is like, I'm so excited about this.
[00:42:57] Speaker A: Thank you. I Mean, it's, it's a, it's. But it's. All the pieces were. Are there. Yeah, we just need to put them together. We have mountains of potential worm food. We have landfills. I mean, literally the tallest point in Florida when you go outside the Panhandle is landfill by Miami.
[00:43:11] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:43:13] Speaker A: And so that's not going to end anytime soon. We're still buying tons of crap, even if it's not coming from China, it's going Vietnam from other places. So we're going to have plenty of plastic crap. And plastic is becoming a bigger and bigger problem for our environment. You know, now they've surveyed every organ in the human body and found microplastics in every person ever tested, basically. I mean, the average person has something like a credit card's worth of nanoplastics in your brain.
And so that's concerning. We don't know what the impact of that is.
[00:43:45] Speaker B: Right.
[00:43:47] Speaker A: And it's because the plastic is sitting around. It's sitting around in our, in our landfills, and it's breaking down by mechanical means. And it's not decaying on a chemical level. But these worms, these organisms, they have already figured out a way enzymatically to turn this into food.
So again, the question is, why aren't we doing something with that? Why not take all these worms, breed an army of them, build a massive facility, take our plastic, fill it up inside that facility, and just let this, let them go hog wild on it.
[00:44:16] Speaker C: How long does it take them to do, to break this stuff down? What is the turnaround?
[00:44:22] Speaker A: That's a very, very relevant question. And that's part of the problem. So the larval worms, while they will eat polystyrene, they'll only eat a handful of grams in, in their entire life. So, you know, per worm, you're gonna get like maybe one gram of plastic.
[00:44:36] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:44:37] Speaker A: Tops. Like, if things go right.
The problem is also. And we. So we actually spent about six months working on trying to get these guys to eat more plastic.
They, they don't like to eat it. They make a mess. They leave lots of little chunks of plastic uneaten because they don't eat 100% of it. So you, you end up with plastic. You have to deal with and separate. And then the other problem is that they are hard to breed. And they, when you breed lots of them, disease can spread among them. So all these logistical issues develop and they don't eat it very fast.
But these worms are using a microbe to digest the plastic at the end of the Day it's actually their gut microbe that that is doing the most of the work.
So while the worm is a prima donna and has all these logistical issues, the microbe doesn't.
And so when we isolate that microbe, when we pull him out of the worm and we take that and we breed that in a bioreactor in its own system.
[00:45:36] Speaker B: Put it in a digester.
[00:45:37] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. In a big digestion, a big simulated worm gut, we can feed the plastic in there and it's one, eaten exponentially faster, two, much more easily scalable, and three, no traces of plastic are left behind when we do that.
[00:45:53] Speaker C: And the byproduct that we're talking about after coming out of it is it's.
[00:45:59] Speaker A: Not worm castings, but it's kind of chemically speaking, it's, it's like a pre poop. It's the kind of material you'd find halfway through the worm's gut. So it's a mixture of organic acids, so all these random materials that you would find in the process of putting together a worm casting, basically. And that material is biodegradable. In fact, it breaks down really, really quickly into dirt, mold and other stuff. But if we take that, we can actually use that as a food supplement for our earthworms. So we take this digestive digested material and we give it to earthworms and they finish the digestion, they turn it fully into worm castings.
[00:46:39] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:46:40] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:46:40] Speaker A: And the result of that is in a, the whole process takes about six weeks.
You go from something like a plastic water bottle, something like, something like this, this is pet, and on the other end you end up with, with castings. And actually I'm going to get up real quick because I have some to show you.
[00:46:58] Speaker B: Oh yeah, Nice.
[00:47:04] Speaker A: Took me a second to grab it.
[00:47:05] Speaker B: Oh yeah. I love this.
[00:47:07] Speaker A: So this is really, really cool. So what I have here, this is the shredded up PET shredded up plastic bottle.
[00:47:13] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:47:14] Speaker A: And we take that and eventually we're able to digest it and break it down into kind of this organic mixture of acids and other junk.
And after about two or three weeks inside the worm bin, it turns into this.
So this is one plastic bottle's worth.
It's a famous soda brand whose name I'm not going to name.
[00:47:39] Speaker B: Right, that's cool.
[00:47:41] Speaker A: And we use this as worm food. And that's worm casting that you get out of it.
[00:47:47] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:47:48] Speaker A: And what's really amazing about that is we've grown plants in that kind of material. And the plants that grow in this, they are normal they're healthy, they're perfectly ordinary. And according to Gabe, they taste the same as normal plants.
[00:48:04] Speaker B: Hey, Gabe, I need you to try this.
[00:48:07] Speaker A: I did not ask him to do that.
[00:48:10] Speaker B: That's awesome.
[00:48:11] Speaker C: Honestly, you know, me being a girl and all, I, I. You, you're. I feel hope.
Like, I'm looking at that bottle, those three bottles, and I see the plastic, and then I see something that's usable at the end of plastic. And it's, it's like, oh, well, maybe there's. There's hope for what's going on right now.
[00:48:36] Speaker A: I think there always is.
I think, especially right now, more than. I think at this point, there is more reason to hope than at any point in the previous, you know, 20 or something years. And it's not just because of what we're doing. It's because there are, there's a lot of research now happening into ways to use microbial life to start to destroy this plastic. I mean, there's that famous quote from Jurassic Park. You know, life finds a way.
It does. When you look at the history of Earth, for example, several hundred million years ago, we had the Carboniferous period, and it's called the Carboniferous period because most of our hydrocarbons come from that time.
In that era, trees evolved bark for the first time.
And for several million years, nothing could eat bark. It was totally indigestible. So mountains of dead trees, their bark, their cellulose and lignin built up upon itself and probably caused a similar scourge to, to, to life as, as plastic is doing some degrees now. And what happened is after millions of years, eventually cellulase, the enzyme for dissolving and destroying cellulose, adapted, and so did lignase and a few other enzymes. And as a consequence, now when trees fall, they, they rot. But in that period, that didn't happen. And so what ended up occurring is all the trees and stuff piled up on top of itself for millions of years and eventually became most of our shale and oil and gas today.
[00:50:05] Speaker C: Right.
[00:50:06] Speaker A: But life recovered from that period. Life has recovered from, you know, the, the introduction of oxygen, the great oxygenation event which occurred in the Cambrian period or prior.
It's recovered from the introduction of, you know, cellulose and lignin. It's recovered from the introduction of methane. It's recovered from even when humans destroyed the ozone layer. So now we're just finding a way to accelerate the process of making life capable of dealing with this other new substance. And it's possible it can be done. And, and I Think it will be done in our lifetimes in such a way that we will no longer have to worry about having a credit card in our brain.
[00:50:41] Speaker B: Right?
[00:50:41] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:50:43] Speaker B: Just a curiosity for me.
What's, what is AI going to bring you when we start looking at machine learning and artificial intelligence with the, with your, I guess you could call it an industry with the stuff that you're doing, where's that going to take you? Like it, it's taking everybody, you know, someplace different. Where's, where do you see it taking you?
[00:51:06] Speaker A: Well, I, I don't have much of an expertise on that side of things, so I really can't say where it will take us. But I will say that I've had a lot of fun using ChatGPT.
It's helped me a lot with doing a lot of basic chemistry and biochemistry work. It's really good at collecting existing research papers and presenting them in a digestible way. So it's very helpful for pushing basic research forward. It's not very good at answering complex chemistry problems, but for a lot of the basic stuff, it's been really, really killer. But what most excites me about AI is the possibility of using it to design enzymes.
So I mentioned enzymes a little briefly, but enzymes are the, they're the actual chemical keys that microbes produce to unlock and destroy certain substances.
Enzymes are very much beyond human, the human capacity to design. They are so absurdly, ridiculously chemically complex. I mean, they're like the, Imagine the most complicated clockwork mechanism ever and then shrink it to the size of, you know, a handful of atoms. It's, and make it, make it organic. So it's now really complicated to build.
Humans can't really do, we can't make enzymes. It's basically beyond us. But an AI may be able to do that. It may be able to learn how to produce enzymes. And if you can produce these custom, specialized enzymes to break down toxic substances like PVC and other stuff and do that in a way that doesn't turn them into more poisonous materials, then you have cracked the code on all waste disposal.
And I think AI the way it's growing, the way it's able to, I mean, it can write songs now, it can make paintings. Those are complicated, very complicated things that are hard to do. I think if you can also do this with enzymes, then the future is very, very bright indeed.
[00:53:03] Speaker B: And I think what you're doing is forming the foundation that it will use to do that. Right. Like you're, you're figuring this stuff out.
I, I, man I can't tell you how excited we are for what you're doing and this has been an amazing conversation.
Where can people learn more about you? Where can they find your product? Where can follow you if they're interested in buying for their pasture or their house plant? How help us out?
[00:53:34] Speaker A: Certainly. Well, I'm always happy to be a resource and if you actually, if you have any questions or anyone who's listening has any questions, I, I love talking about worms. So feel free to contact me at info infoigglebrew.com and you can always reach me there. I try to check my email quite a lot. You can also find
[email protected] so Riggle Brew is W R I G G L E b r e w.com rigglebrew.com you can find information about our research, our awards, what we're doing, how to use the product most efficiently and of course you can purchase it there. We do sizes from a 32 ounce bottle all the way up to a full truckload of 275 gallon totes. So anywhere from 18,000 and change gallons to two 32 ounces. We do it all. We've worked with farmers growing everything from soy, corn, alfalfa, grasses, all the way down to azalea and orchid and, and fun things like that. So we're, we're a pretty cool company if I do say so myself. And I hope we can be a resource to you, if not educationally, then perhaps for your farm or your garden.
[00:54:43] Speaker B: Well, I would agree with you on the pretty cool company. Pretty cool, I gotta say. Understatement. But yeah, I'm, I'm with you. That's. You have built something that is really cool, honestly.
[00:54:55] Speaker C: Yeah. Well, thank you. And thank you for, for teaching us. You know, there's so much that most of us don't know as we go about our, you know, regular lives, about what's happening below the surface, what, what we need above the surface. And you're at your, your level of expertise has just been really, really refreshing. And thank you for bringing it down for us a little bit whenever I asked you to. You did a great job at let's, let's bring it down for, for the average person to be able to understand these really complex things.
[00:55:27] Speaker A: Yeah. Thank you. I love talking about worms. Yeah.
[00:55:30] Speaker B: Is there last, last, last comments will go to you. Is there anything we should have talked about that we missed or anything that you want to highlight as we land this plane?
[00:55:43] Speaker A: My favorite kind of earthworm. Oh yeah.
[00:55:46] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:55:47] Speaker A: My Favorite kind of earthworm is the Peryonyx excavatus, the Blue Indian worm. They are extremely heat tolerant and they are really unique because they sequester heavy metals. And there's actually a lesson in how they do this, I think, for humanity, for us as a country, as a species.
When these worms come across toxins and heavy metals in the soil, they absorb them into their body, into their biomass. They do this really selectively and strongly for two reasons. One, because it protects the plants that they're eating from these heavy metals. And you think, well, that doesn't make a lot of sense. What if it hurts them? Well, these worms are counting on having more children than they are in number at this present moment, essentially, which means that the next generation will have a little bit less heavy metal to deal with, and the plants they eat won't have any in them, and the next generation will have a little bit less. So it's a. A kind of. They. They perform almost a kind of self sacrificial biochemical process in order to help their next generation do better. And they do this every generation without end. And it keeps the environment around them better and available to their. To their offspring, and it keeps their offspring able to. To live and reproduce in larger and larger numbers. And I think there's. Maybe, I can't describe it succinctly, but there's something beautiful about that almost kind of heroic evolutionary mechanism that they have. And I think there's a lesson that.
[00:57:16] Speaker C: We could learn from.
There's a lesson to be learned there.
[00:57:19] Speaker A: There's a lesson to be learned. And there was this ancient Greek saying that societies grow wise when old men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit.
And even earthworms do it. So I think we could, maybe we should try to emulate them. Yes. They may be little worms and very humble organisms, but I think there's something to be learned there.
[00:57:38] Speaker C: This has been a fantastic conversation.
Thank you, Sam.
[00:57:42] Speaker B: Yeah, Seriously, thank you so much.
[00:57:44] Speaker C: All right. Is that good?
[00:57:46] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:57:47] Speaker C: Hey, thanks for hanging out with us again today on the Duster Mud podcast. And until next time, bye, y' all.
[00:57:53] Speaker B: Bye, y' all.
