Red worm feeding fields in Lleida, Vermicompost Lombec

Interviewing Ramon Trepat, vermiculturist and Executive Director of Vermiculture Innovation S.L. and Lombec

April 2003

A company from Lleida (Spain) implements an innovative system that allows natural transformation of manure into compost using earthworms.
"They eat the manure and after digesting it they excrete it. The advantage is that when the manure passes through their organism a lot of bacterial colony is added and this is very rich and beneficial for the ground.", Ramon Trepat explains.

A company from Spain has found a way to eliminate the manure by transforming it in a completely natural way to an organic fertilizer for the soils. What this company do is to import a curious system that actually exists for a long time in countries like the Netherlands. They make grow some red worms from California that eat the manure and expel it converted into fertilizer.

This mountain of cattle manure will be fertilizer for agriculture and gardening in a year. To achieve this no chemical process will be used since the transformation will be done by these red worms from California. These invertebrates are buried under these rows of composted manure and water is supplied to them so that they always have moisture. A new bed of manure is added every fifteen days. Little by little the worms reproduce and double their population every two months. At the same time they are eating the manure and when they expel it, it has become a natural fertilizer of great organic richness and without any type of toxicity for the soil.

"This bacterial colony is what has been incorporated into the final product that we commercialize and which we call Lombec. But it is only the process of feeding the worm: what he excretes is the earthworm humus that we take out and that goes so well for the growth and strengthening of the plants", says Ramon Trepat.

Vermiculture Innovation, this company from Lleida (Spain), has been the first company in Catalonia to use worms to manufacture compost or, better said, vermicompost. This system, named vermiculture, has been used successfully in the United States, the Netherlands and Italy for years, since it is a very good option to recycle plant waste of beef, cattle and birds. In Spain, this fertilizer is used in the intensive crops of the greenhouses in Almeria. At the moment, the promoters of this initiative have already obtained distributors for their product in Catalonia and have also exported some items to Portugal. Nowadays, they produce more than 600 tonnes of fertilizer per year, a figure that could be increased if the product is well accepted.