GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — We have heard since grade school that the environment operates as a cycle. The things that humans put into the earth end up leaking into our soils, eventually soaking back into our food supply, and back into our bodies.
Wormies, a local company based right here in Grand Rapids, recognized something standing in the way of this cycle.
The owner of the company, Luis Chen, said that when he first moved to Grand Rapids he noticed that there weren't many options for composting your food scraps.
This is a process that takes your food waste and cycles it back into the earth naturally. Without this our waste ends up in landfills, where plastics and metals stand in the way of proper decomposition.
Soil director, Chandler Michialsky, went on to say, “instead of turning down and breaking into rich fertile soil, it breaks down into a bunch of really harmful gases like methane, carbon dioxide and stuff that's leading to global warming and contributing to climate change."
Wormies of Grand Rapids wanted to find a solution to this while also finding a way to profit from the company.
“Through Wormies we have a composting service where we come to your house and give you a five-gallon bucket so you can collect your food scraps while you're cooking. We come back a week later to pick it up, bring it to our farm where we then feed it to our worms," stated Chen.
The worms eat our scraps and their poop is used to make what Wormies calls "biocomplete soil." Biologically complete soil is soil that is composed of the entire soil food web. It contains protozoa, nematodes, beneficial bacteria, and fungi. All things that are great to grow healthy produce.
"So that's the thing with most conventional soils nowadays, and like most of the food that you see on the grocery stores is, it's not grown with biology, so it's lacking the minerals," explained Michialsky.
By lacking that life in our soil we are not feeding out plants with the proper nutrition, and in turn not feeding our bodies properly.
We spoke with a nutrition specialist, Dr. Janna Hibler, about how growing food in this biocomplete soil can help improve our gut health.
She began by explaining that our bodies are made up of good bugs and bad bugs. The more good bugs we have the healthier our gut health is.
"We want diversity. We want a bunch of different bugs in the soil. If we don't have the right amount of bugs we can have more bad bugs than quote on quote good bugs in our bodies. Making it hard to run our energy pathways our metabolism, and most importantly we can not make the right brain chemistry," stated Dr. Hibler.
This can impact the way we think and feel.
"When we use compost we know there is going to be a greater diversity of bugs for better gut health. That is what Wormies is doing by making biocomplete soil."
That means that Wormies is not only helping to create a cleaner environment, but they are indirectly improving our physical health.
The composting service costs seven dollars a pickup. Every eight pick-ups wormies will gift you with a four-pound bag of their premium vermicompost, which is said to work wonders on your gardens and in flower water.
They also sell their soil but explained that because of the extensive year-long process that it takes to get the soil from a compost state to a nutrient-filled soil, it is more costly than a typical fertilized compost soil.
For more details head to Wormies website or check them out on Instagram/Facebook.
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