San Pablo, Heredia, Costa Rica
I have worked for 12 years through my company (www.biofuturacr.com) in biomass management, food waste recovery and compost production, as well as regenerative agriculture, but I have not been able to specialize in vermicomposting. In Costa Rica there are only a few mid-scale companies working on vermicomposting.
In our company we´ve only dedicated for the last 4 years to reproduce the worm on a small scale to incorporate it into our BEAM compost production process (BEAM stands for Biologically Enhanced Agricultural Management). This type of compost process was originally promoted by Dr. David Johnson and it is a compost with very high microbiological diversity and with a fungal biomass/bacterial biomass ratio greater than “one”.
As I get the chance to attend the next International Vermicomposting Symposium, I intend to learn enough about vermicomposting so that I can become an expert in reproducing the worm and be able to use it at a greater scale and improve the production of BEAM composting.
I believe that I can also contribute afterwards to teach people in Costa Rica about vermicomposting from a more modern and fresh point of view, and specially teach how to produce a much better quality compost to be used in our need of transitioning from conventional agriculture to regenerative agriculture.
At Biofutura we have inoculated large quantities of normal compost (such as that produced from horse manure for example) with small quantities of BEAM compost (75% to 25%), managing to bring the high diversity and high presence of fungi from the BEAM compost into the horse manure compost. This is important because our farmers can be taught how to take their composts from regular quality to high quality so that they can improve their yields and the quality of their products; the worm plays an important role in all of this.
To produce BEAM compost we only need dry leaves or wood ships and worms, and we have already verified that if worms are not used in this type of process, the final quality of BEAM compost decreases.