The cotton industry has seen a lot of bad press; depleting water supplies, poisoning water tables with pesticide – and producing tons and tons of cotton-bud leftovers that blight the landscape around processing plants. In rural NSW, Australia, one man has woven a profitable business out of cotton waste, using worms. By Jeremy Torr.

Carrathool, NSW. July 2020. In 2010, Riverina farmer Adrian Raccanello decided that his crusade to stop using artificial fertilisers on his fruit and vines needed a boost. So he pioneered a new business that now not only supplies up to 50,000 tonnes of high-grade 100% organic fertiliser, but also saves tens of thousands of tonnes of waste from being buried in landfills - every year. All this with the help of millions of slippery workers that work for free and poop all over the place: worms.

Raccanello’s company, Wormtech, is driven by sustainability goals, but also uses high technology plus a keen eye for a new opportunity.

“After years of using chemical fertilisers we decided to incorporate some natural fertilisers into our farming practices,” he says on his website. “The increase in quality, production and overall plant and soil health was obvious, and also the chemical fertilisers we were using no longer delivered the plant available nutrients, due to overuse.”

The company says the effects of added chemical fertilisers when growing edible crops “must have a negative impact on our health,” emphasising the difference of a chemical free grown piece of fruit in comparison to many fruit and vegetables bought in supermarkets. “The produce found in most shops looks appealing but often lacks taste and texture,” it says.

With 20 years hands-on experience in farming, growing crops such as wine grapes, seed crops, garlic, vegetables and fruit in the Riverina, Raccanello recognized that with other farmers thinking along the same lines, there was a real opportunity to produce high quality organic fertiliser for sale locally.

What the consumer (and farmers) need, argues Wormtech, is a fertiliser that benefits the environment, improves soil moisture retention, promotes higher and more consistent soil temperature, and if possible brings with it loads of beneficial organisms. If it can also improve plant resistance to disease and pests too then that is a bonus. Now, it was up to Raccanello to find a supply of the product.

So what started as a spin-off from Raccanello’s own farming approach became a serious investigation of chemical free fertilisers. Being situated next to one of Australia’s biggest cotton-growing areas, the Riverina, allowed the new company to tap into what was up until then just an eyesore by-product of the cotton industry; the paddocks next to the massive Rivcott Cotton Gin at Carrathool were lined with heaps of thousands of tonnes of rotting, hardened cotton residue. And the huge white spoil heaps were expanding by even more thousands of tonnes every year even though the cotton waste does eventually rot down – but it takes up to 10 years, and renders the land it is on unusable.

Wormtech decided to take a punt and offer to dispose of some of the cotton waste by mixing it with other organic by-products that would help it rot down more quickly, to produce compost fertiliser. Raccanello approached local councils in towns like Mildura and Wagga Wagga, and asked if he could take their organic waste stream to mix with the cotton waste to make a compost starter mix. The idea worked, but although it took a lot less than 10 years to break down, it was still slower than it could be. So Raccanello decided to call on the animal world for help; he brought in the worms.

“Worms have been nature’s best recyclers since the beginning of creation. Their ability to consume and excrete anything that was once a living organism can be matched by no known man made process,” he adds. “So our interest in (natural fertilisers) grew and particularly our interest in the benefits of compost worms and their by-products.”

Today, Wormtech boasts of being one of the largest worm farms in Australia, on course for producing 200,000 tonnes of high grade, worm-assisted compost a year. "So it's really waste to resource," said Raccanello in a recent interview. “Our compost greatly improves soil condition, water holding capacity, nutrient uptake, as well as increasing biology and organic structure within the soil. The waste goes back onto the land and into improving the soil."

Although it might sound easy, it’s not just a matter of throwing some worms onto the cotton waste along with a few bucket-fulls of garden waste from the local gardener’s bins. The raw materials have to be blended accurately together in the correct proportions, and mixed up together so the worms have what could be described as a starter culture. All this – on the massive scale that Wormtech operates – demands some fairly high tech gear, with huge machines constantly on the move spreading, turning, mixing, shredding and grading the materials. But the result is some top quality compost.

"We basically just feed the top 4 to 6 inches," said Raccanello. "Then the worms work their way through the pile and just break it down. You don't get any better: they are nature's best recyclers. The broader the mix of organic material, the better the end product."

Wormtech is expanding its operations and combining cotton with other waste to give it more diverse ingredients for different kinds of compost. And thanks to the worms, it does it fast: it takes only a couple of months to produce rich crumbly black compost that can be used in bulk by farmers, or in bagfuls on the local garden plot.

Today, Raccanello is looking forward to a big worm-assisted future. "We want to be one of the main receptacles for untapped organic waste," he said. "And we will end up with the most refined manure in the world."