The Organic Process - From Worms to Wine

Cynthia Connolly owns a 55-acre organic farm just outside Monticello, where she has a vineyard, an orchard and a small chicken-and-egg operation. She's been working with red worms since starting out with one cup of them in 1992. Over the years, she has slowly built her stock up to more than a half-dozen large worm beds, providing enough droppings to fertilize her entire farm and still have leftovers to sell to local nurseries. Vermiculture, raising worms for commercial purposes, has grown in pockets around the country. The red worms serve two ends of the feeding cycle, as both food sources and waste disposers.

Most of the organic leftovers around her farm come from the vineyard. Each summer, Connolly grows muscadine grapes to bottle as wine, and the process leaves her with truckloads of pressed pulp. She takes them full cycle - vines producing grapes, grapes pressed to make wine, microbes breaking down the discarded skins, worms eating the microbes, their 'castings' fertilizing the vines, and the whole thing starting again.

I don't use any chemicals here, she said. The worms do everything.

Full article in the Tallahassee Democrat Red worms leave nothing to waste.