One of our key aims is to introduce the principles of the circular economy to the production and distribution of good quality nutritious food for the Austerity Food Retail (AFR) sector. AFR addresses people most affected by austerity and the cost of living crisis. It includes social supermarkets, pantries and other forms of community shop offering highly discounted products, and often making use of surplus, waste or rejected foods which would otherwise be thrown away. 

The circular economy is a system where food and other materials never become waste and nature is regenerated. In a circular economy, products and materials are kept in circulation through processes like maintenance, reuse, refurbishment, remanufacture, recycling, and composting.

Our original plan was to introduce vermiculture – worm farms -  into the composting of food and other organic waste at our growing sites in the Spring of  2025. The aim was to use the organic fertiliser that the worms produce to improve the quantity and quality of the food we produce for AFR  during the summer months.

But one of our partner organisations, Egino Emerging  https://www.eginoemerging.org/

had the capacity to help out now and so we have taken on our first worm farm to introduce the principles of the circular economy to the production and distribution of good quality nutritious food for the AFR sector.

The bins are continuous flow wormeries. We enlist the people on probation working at our growing sites to top them up with old waste from the gardens  together with shredded cardboard (worms love the cardboard) and keep it well watered. The pipes at the front create a ledge and the worms live on top of this, in all the organic matter. They eat the organic matter and the result is a continuous flow of organic fertiliser that falls below the ledge and can be collected through the holes at the bottom for use on the growing sites to improve the quality and quantity of the yield and so turn food and other organic waste into good quality, highly nutritious food for AFR.

What’s more, by supplying us with these worm farms Egino also help us fulfil two further aims. By opening up the possibility of scaling  up for commercial production of organic fertiliser we can potentially create new income streams for AFR to bulk buy non surplus food supplies to supplement the dwindling supplies of surplus and donated food currently available to them. Many prison and community payback facilities in the United States do exactly that, so why can’t we do the same here to help the commercial sustainability of AFR?

https://eu.thegleaner.com/story/news/2019/03/25/worm-farming-saves-henderson-county-jail-thousands/3221605002/

But secondly, not only does this open up commercial possibilities to support AFR, it also helps fulfil our aim of opening up employment and self employment opportunities for the people on probation working on our project when they have successfully completed their unpaid work requirements with us.

So in the new year we will be introducing  Egino’s  Worm Farm Business Training and Support Course as an option for people on probation placed with us https://www.eginoemerging.org/free-worm-farming-course  - not only using worms to turn the circular economy, but also to turn the lives of people on probation round.