Besides the amazing plant growth aspects of worm castings, natural pesticide features are compelling as well. Research done by North Carolina State University found that crops grown with worm castings are much less likely to have pest issues. Many different types of pests will stay away from crops grown with worm castings in the soil. 

Natural Pesticide & Fertilizer in One

The regular method of growing many crops involves paying once for fertilizer and then paying a second time for some kind of pesticide so that your crops are actually intact when it's time to harvest. With worm castings, the pesticide is built right into the product and you may not need to invest additional capital in pesticide.

Cost Effective

When you add the costs of what you would pay for fertilizer and pesticide together and then compare it to worm castings, the scales start to tip in favor of worm castings in a big way.

Disease Prevention

Greenhouses make it possible for gardeners and farmers to grow plants in many different climates and seasons. While they give you a lot of flexibility in the growing process, they present their own set of challenges. One of the most common problems when growing plants in a greenhouseis disease. Certain pathogens thrive on indoor plants and growers often turn to chemicals to eliminate them. If you're trying to grow plants in an organic fashion, chemicals aren't really an option though. For this situation, worm castings provide the ideal solution.

Many greenhouse owners are turning to worm castings due to their ability to stave off pathogens and disease. According to research done by Cornell University, worm castings release “a substance that interferes with the chemical signaling between the host and the pathogen.”

When planting inside a greenhouse, earthworm castings can provide you with a type of “disease insurance” against whatever might make its way inside. On top of that, you still get all of the other plant boosting benefits of the organic worm's manure.

Cost Effective

For farmers who are just learning about castings, worm manure might not seem like it would work on a large scale, but nothing could be further from the truth. Worm castings are the most cost-effective and potent solution on the market for fertilizing crops on a large scale. 

A little goes a long way! Worm castings may be higher than other solutions on a cost-per-ton basis, but you don't have to use as much as you would with other fertilizers. This means that if you're only comparing dollars-per-ton with other types of fertilizers, you're not getting a true apples-to-apples comparison. Instead, it makes sense to calculate based on dollars-per-acre or the area measurement you're using. In that light, worm castings start to look very attractive.

Two-in-One Fertilizer and Natural Pesticide

As you start to dig into how much it would cost to use earthworm castings on your farm, you might think “hold on...this worm poop costs more per ton than chicken manure that I can get down the street.” If that's as far as you took your analysis, then yes, you probably would think that it's more expensive to go with worm castings.

The key thing to think about when pricing worm castings is that you're not just buying fertilizer. You're essentially buying fertilizer and pesticide at the same time. If you're growing a crop that requires a lot of water, you're also getting something that reduces the amount of water you have to use substantially.

Crops Require Less Water

Worm castings retain moisture, due to their structure, which means instead of the water running off, it's right there where the plants need it. Depending on the condition of the soil and the crop, worm castings allow you to use 50-75% less water than you normally would in the growing process.

By the time you add up the cost of another fertilizer, a chemical pesticide, and the water for the crops, there's a good chance castings are more cost-effective. Things can swing even more in favor of castings if you utilize a worm castings tea. This is a concoction in which you soak worm castings in water and use that on crops.

Many farmers do this to add an extra layer of “natural pesticide” to the crops, while providing vital nutrients to the crops simultaneously.

25-40% Higher Yield

After you get past the cost argument for castings on a large scale, you also have to think about the other major benefits. One of the most profound benefits for farmers is the possibility of increased yield. According to Nature Research, the presence of worm castings in soil leads to a 25% increase in crop yields on average.

That means you may get up to 25% more crops than you would ordinarily just by using worm castings. If you're doing an economic analysis, adding another 25% to your total yield will make a huge difference.

Perhaps the best part is that you can do all of this without harmful chemicals. Castings can be part of an organic farming operation, which opens your crops up to an entirely new segment of customers and businesses.

If you operate a large farm or agricultural facility, you may be looking for an easy way to apply worm castings. In that case, the most economical way to use worm castings is by making worm castings tea.

With this approach, you can make a mixture of water and worm castings to create a liquid fertilizer that’s perfect for large areas. Don’t worry…it’s really simple and we can walk you through it. We’ve even got an industrial size worm castings tea production kit that attaches to a 55 gallon drum that’s perfect for large scale operations.

With worm castings tea, five pounds of castings can make enough worm castings tea to cover an acre of land. That means one 2300 lb. super sack of Simple Grow castings and our industrial tea kit can make enough worm castings tea to cover as much as 460 acres!

When using tea, it’s ideal to reapply it every 1-2 months during growing season. So even if you don’t have that much land to cover with tea, you’d have enough to make additional batches of tea for future applications.

Making a batch of tea is as simple as pouring the castings in the drum of water, adding some molasses as a food source, and then turning on the tea kit. You then leave it for 24 hours to mix up.

From that point you’ve got about 6 hours to apply the tea with a sprayer for best results. This gets the live microbes right onto your plants or the soil. You’ll be amazed at how well this solution can work compared to regular, commercial fertilizers.