There are millions of worms at TRAD Worm Industries in Cypress County, with lots of research taking place. Kevin Kyle/CHAT News

By Jesse Gill

FOOD SECURITY

Millions of worms helping create healthier food in Cypress County

Feb 12, 2025 | 5:42 PM

There are millions of worms at TRAD Worm Industries in Cypress County that help to create healthier food.

It’s an operation that Roxanne Doerksen started back in 2018 in response to her child getting sick.

She said they started to look at ways to grow food in a way to better support her daughter’s immune system.

This lead Doerksen to worm castings, or worm excrement, and the benefit they provide for growing food.

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Doerksen wanted to scale it up, so that they could produce a really quality casting others could use to support the nutritional uptake of the plant, but also be environmentally thoughtful.

She said what the worms can produce is easier for the plants to utilize as food, and they have done a number of trials to help this.

“We’ve had so many failures and so many successes, and we learn about how to deal with these failures and how to grow food better and how to utilize garbage,” Doerksen said.

The worms have broken down a variety of materials like coffee grounds, drywall, wood, hair and fabric, with a variety of outcomes, but also helping avoid them from being in the landfill.

“We did a trial with a hairdresser, and we took all of their hair and we fed it to the worms,” Doerksen said.

“Fabric is a huge one, one of my favorite trials, because I like quilting, how can we utilize all of it so there’s nothing left? And we work with a really interesting company from Calgary called Spirit West where they sew high-tech outdoor apparel, and we get to utilize their stuff,” she added.

“We’re doing a five-year trial with them, trying to figure out if we can actually break it down, not into microfracturing, but into daughter products.”

What the worms will produce changes by what they eat, which is something Doerksen continues to research and learn more about.

“We have microscopes up at the house, and we check everything, but we send it off to the lab, and we go down that rabbit hole,” Doerksen said.

“We want to know what biology is happening there. How much respiration does it have? And we utilize CARA [Soil Health] Labs in Oyen, they have been such a gift to us because they take it to the next level,” she added.

“What did it actually break down into? And is that going to be beneficial, or is it going to be harmful? I want to know right to the end of what happens.”

Doerksen said if something is contaminated, they will look at what they can to help the worms facilitate the cleaning of it.

“We use a lot of oyster mushrooms helping to facilitate the cleaning of it,” Doerksen.

“Hydrocarbons, so oil and gas wells. We’ve gone and have been allowed to put our products on there to see if we can help facilitate that quicker, and we have.”

Doerksen said, the cool thing about being a very small company is they can change quick.

“If we can see that something isn’t working, I phone the biologist or I phone the entomologist that sits on our staff, and I’m like, hey, this isn’t working. What do we need to do? And they’re like, hey, try this,” Doerksen said.

“So we can change mid-time and really react quicker.”