Worms for human manure

by Walt
(Colorado)

European nightcrawlers

European nightcrawlers

I need to make positive impression on new woman in my life. I'd like to upgrade my sawdust toilet that goes in woodstove (nine month winter here) and convert to worms for summer and hopefully full time through winter. How much volume and worms would I need to keep up with two adults. Coolish temperatures between 45 in winter and 65 in summer. Thanks

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Jan 06, 2020
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starstarstarstarstar 		Re: Can the worms handle composted humanure/sawdust?
by: Stephan

Hello Delisa,

nice to hear from you and I am glad we could be of assistance to you :-).

There should generally no problem for the worms to feed on your composted dog poop and saw dust mixture.

Ideally the saw dust should be from untreated wood as this would ensure that there are no harmful chemicals in it but compost worms have a great ability to feed on many materials that have some kind of contamination on them and remove a lot of the harmful ingredients into their own bodies.

If you are not certain just start with a small pilot project just feeding a small population of worms in a single worm bin with the composted humanure and sawdust mixture for a while and see how the worms cope with it.

But as I said I believe that the worms should have no issues converting the humanure and sawdust into nutrient rich worm castings.

Please let us know if you have further questions and once you have some updates?! It would be great information for our worm composting community.

Kind regards

Stephan Kloppert

Author of "How to start a profitable worm business on a shoestring budget"

Editor of www.worm-composting-help.com
Jan 05, 2020
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starstarstarstarstar 		Can the worms handle composted humanure/sawdust?
by: Delisa

I was happy to see your suggestion about using the composted humanure (thermaphilic process) to feed to the worms. We already have large quantities of composted humanure, but it has a lot of remaining sawdust in it and I don't find it very useful in the garden with this much sawdust.

So could we feed this completed sawdust to the worms? And would they be able to break down the remaining sawdust and add their own magic to the composted humanure. It sounds like this would eliminate any problems with pathogens.

I so appreciate your providing an opportunity to discuss and learn about this important topic!

Delisa
Apr 02, 2018
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starstarstarstarstar 		Re: Worms for human manure
by: Stephan

Hello Walt

The winter temperatures you mentioned are just above the temperatures that the most popular compost worms (Eisenia fetida) known as red wigglers tolerate but at those lower temperatures they will become a little sluggish so you might want to make sure their bin is a little insulated to keep them very active.

2 adults will probably produce close to t0 2 pounds / 1 kg of humanure (poop) per day plus the paper. You would need about 10000 compost worms to take care of this amount of waste and should have a worm farm that has a surface area of at least 1 meter square / 10.76 square feet.

In addition you should separate most of the urine and use it rather as natural fertilizer or for a compost heap.

Once your worms have converted all the humanure into worm castings it is advisable to store the worm castings for at least one year but preferably 2 years before you use them to make sure that all the potential pathogens they might carry are completely destroyed. Alternatively you can recycle your human waste poop and urine in a thermophilic compost heap and feed the finished compost to the worms.

Kind regards

Stephan Kloppert

Author of "How to start a profitable worm business on a shoestring budget"

Editor of www.worm-composting-help.com

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