Praise for the Earthworm

In 1881 Charles Darwin wrote: "Without the work of this humble creature, who knows nothing of the benefits he confers upon mankind, agriculture, as we know it, would be very difficult, if not wholly impossible." The great evolutionist was referring to the lowly earthworm.

In 1906 a young Texas physician and surgeon named George Sheffield Oliver read Darwin's book on earthworms. A descendant of the James Oliver who invented the steel plow, George Oliver was living on a five-acre plot, and he decided to try earthworm culture on his grounds. Soon earthworms were such a big part of his life that he gave up his medical practice for them. Today Dr. Oliver is the author of a three-volume treatise on earthworms, a subject on which he is acknowledged by many to be the world's No. 1 authority. His story was told last week in Nature Magazine by John Edwin Hogg.

Constantly and voraciously, earthworms eat earth, dead leaves, decaying organic matter of all sorts. The waste material they throw off as worm casts is one of the richest of all plant foods. Moreover, worm tunnels-air the soil, helping the oxygen and nitrogen metabolism of plants. And the tunnels make fine watering tubes, facilitate rainfall storage. Darwin estimated that a healthy English acre ought to have about 2,500,000 worms, turning out 18 tons of casts a year.

Dr. Oliver started propagating earthworms in culture beds, colonizing his grounds. His trees and flowers grew more beautiful, his garden produce bigger and tastier. His strawberries were fat crimson marvels. Neighbors asked him for his secret, but Oliver would not tell. Wealthy people began paying him big money to beautify their estates, pep up their gardens. They cared not how he did it; they were delighted with the results.

Oliver branched out to public parks and cemeteries, eventually to $10,000-and-up jobs for cinema stars in Hollywood, whither his fame had traveled. The worm wizard moved to California, set up a ten-acre experimental farm in Los Angeles County. It was guarded by tall board fences topped with barbed wire. When Depression set in after 1929, Oliver at last told his secret, for the benefit of hard-pressed farmers. By that time he had rolled up a tidy fortune.

He is still a big worm operator. Earthworms are hermaphrodites; all healthy adults lay eggs by the score, and Oliver gathers them by the million, from layers of damp burlap in his culture beds. Packed in damp peat moss, they can be shipped any distance. Thirty days after being unpacked and put in the soil, the eggs hatch; 90 days later they become adults laying eggs of their own. Earthworms make a wonderfully nourishing and relatively cheap food for poultry, hatchery fish, market frogs, terrapin. Everybody knows that chickens like worms. Dr. Oliver has devised what he calls an "intensive range" poultry diet--sprouted grain mixed with worms and worm-egg capsules. Fed on this at a cost of one-tenth of a cent a day, pullets start laying Grade A hen's eggs before they are five months old. Wizard Oliver also sells worm casts for fertilizer, and a liquid nutrient (for flower growers) which is made by letting water drip through worm casts in boxes.

Oliver is the only man who has successfully crossbred any of the 1,100 species of earthworms. For feeding chickens, frogs, etc., he produced a meaty hybrid ten inches long. Another hybrid, short and thick, yields a colorless, odorless, volatile oil useful in medicine. A medium-sized hybrid, very tough and vigorous, can be used to recolonize soils whose worm populations have been killed off by strong fertilizers or poison sprays. Oliver calls it his "soilution worm." In California and elsewhere there are several hundred farmers who have planted great batches of eggs, raised earthworm armies in their soil. Some years back, practically all of those farmers were staggering on the brink of bankruptcy. Today, says Chronicler Hogg, every one, without exception, is making healthy profits.

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