They Called Him Crazy for Raising Worms on the Far

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]In the summer of 1987, a 62-year-old farmer named Everett Calloway stood in the middle of his dying cornfield in rural Harlan County, Kentucky, and made a decision that his neighbors would talk about for the next 20 years.

[00:00:15]He wasn't going to plant corn anymore.

[00:00:18]He wasn't going to plant soybeans, either. No wheat, no tobacco, not a single crop that any sensible farmer in that county had ever relied on.

[00:00:28]Instead, Everett Calloway was going to raise worms.

[00:00:32]Not for fishing bait, though. That's what his brother-in-law assumed when he first heard about it. Not as some strange hobby. Everett was going to raise red wiggler worms by the millions, turn them loose in his dead soil, and bet his entire farm on the idea that these tiny creatures, creatures most people stepped on without a second thought, were going to save American agriculture.

[00:00:55]His neighbor, a stubborn old cattleman named Dale Pruitt, leaned over the fence one August morning, looked at the shallow wooden beds Everett was building, and said five words that cut deep.

[00:01:08]Ev, you've lost your mind.

[00:01:11]What happened over the next decade would prove Dale Pruitt spectacularly, wonderfully wrong.

[00:01:17]But this story isn't just about one man and his worms. It's about the science beneath our feet that most of us have never been taught. It's about a farming crisis that nearly destroyed the American heartland. And it's about why what Everett Calloway did in those wooden beds, and what thousands of farmers across the country eventually followed, maybe one of the most quietly important agricultural revolutions of the 20th century.

[00:01:42]Stay with me, because by the end of this story, you will never look at a handful of dirt the same way again.

[00:01:50]To understand why Everett Calloway did what he did, you have to understand what American farmland looked like in the 1970s and early 1980s.

[00:01:59]Everett had inherited his 280-acre farm from his father, Hollis Callaway, who had inherited it from his father before that.

[00:02:08]Three generations of the same family had worked that same red clay Kentucky soil.

[00:02:13]But by the time Everett took full ownership in 1974, the land was in trouble.

[00:02:19]Decades of heavy chemical fertilizers, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, the so-called NPK triumvirate that had become standard practice after World War II had done something nobody warned farmers about in the 1950s when those chemicals were first being sold as miracle solutions.

[00:02:39]Yes, the yields had gone up dramatically in the short term. The corn grew tall, the soybeans multiplied, profits climbed.

[00:02:48]But the soil itself was slowly dying.

[00:02:51]You see, healthy farmland is not just dirt.

[00:02:55]Healthy soil is a living ecosystem. One single teaspoon of healthy soil contains more living organisms than there are people on Earth. Bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, and yes, earthworms, all working in a complex invisible community that processes nutrients, aerates the ground, retains water, and creates the conditions in which plants can thrive.

[00:03:20]The heavy chemical approach treated soil like a factory floor. Pour in the inputs, extract the outputs, repeat. And for a generation it worked.

[00:03:30]But those chemicals, applied year after year, began killing off the very microbial life that made the soil functional in the first place.

[00:03:38]Without that life, the soil became compacted and dense.

[00:03:43]Rain ran off the surface instead of soaking in. Nutrients washed away into streams.

[00:03:48]The land became dependent on ever-increasing doses of chemicals just to produce the same yield.

[00:03:55]By the late 1970s, Everett Callaway was spending more on fertilizer and pesticides than he was earning from his crops. He was farming at a loss, and he wasn't alone.

[00:04:06]Across the Midwest and the Upper South, tens of thousands of family farms were in the same death spiral.

[00:04:13]The famous farm crisis of the 1980s, which saw over 300,000 American family farms go bankrupt and forced countless farming families off land that had been in their families for generations, had many causes, but one of them, the one that never made the evening news, was this: the soil was exhausted.

[00:04:33]Everett had an eighth-grade education.

[00:04:36]He had never read a scientific journal in his life, but he had 40 years of watching that land, and he knew something was wrong that no bag of fertilizer was going to fix.

[00:04:47]The answer came from an unlikely place.

[00:04:50]In the spring of 1985, Everett's daughter, Patricia, was studying agricultural science at the University of Kentucky. She came home for Easter weekend carrying a thick paperback book she'd been assigned in class. The author was a man named Dr. George Sheffield, a soil biologist from Ohio State University who had spent 30 years studying what he called the underground economy of healthy farmland.

[00:05:15]The book was dense and full of scientific terminology.

[00:05:19]Everett struggled through the first 50 pages, but one chapter stopped him cold.

[00:05:25]It was the chapter on Lumbricus terrestris and Eisenia fetida, the common earthworm and the red wiggler worm.

[00:05:33]Dr. Sheffield described in plain, methodical terms what earthworms actually do to soil.

[00:05:39]As they burrow, they create channels that allow air and water to penetrate deep into the ground. Their digestive systems break down organic matter, dead leaves, plant roots, decomposing material, and transform it into something called castings, which is a polite scientific word for worm manure.

[00:05:59]But here's the extraordinary part, the part that made Everett set the book down and stare at the ceiling for a long time. Worm castings are not ordinary fertilizer. They are, gram for gram, among the most nutrient-dense, biologically active substances that can be added to depleted soil. They contain five times more nitrogen than ordinary topsoil, seven times more phosphorus, and 11 times more potassium, the same three nutrients that Everett was paying a fortune to buy in chemical bags.

[00:06:31]But unlike synthetic fertilizer, worm castings come packaged with millions of beneficial microorganisms.

[00:06:38]They don't just feed the plant, they feed the soil itself.

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[00:06:49]Dr. Sheffield's research showed that land populated with a healthy earthworm community, roughly 1 million worms per acre was his benchmark, could regenerate its own fertility without chemical input within 3 to 5 years.

[00:07:03]1 million worms per acre?

[00:07:06]Everett Callaway put the book down, walked out to his back field, and dug his hands into the ground. He sifted through a double handful of soil. In soil as healthy as Dr. Sheffield described, you would find dozens of worms in a single handful.

[00:07:22]He found none, not one.

[00:07:25]His land was not just sick, it was empty.

[00:07:29]What followed was a year of quiet, methodical research. Everett wrote letters, this was long before email, to three university agricultural extension offices, and to Dr. Sheffield himself.

[00:07:41]Dr. to Everett's astonishment, actually wrote back a long, detailed, handwritten letter that Everett kept in a shoebox for the rest of his life.

[00:07:52]Dr. Sheffield confirmed what Everett suspected.

[00:07:55]He outlined a practical method called vermiculture, the deliberate raising and farming of worms, and a related practice called vermicomposting, in which organic waste material is fed to large populations of red wiggler worms to produce commercial quantities of worm castings. He explained that some farmers in California and Oregon were already experimenting with it, mostly small organic operations.

[00:08:21]Nobody had tried it at significant scale in the traditional corn belt.

[00:08:26]Everett spent the winter of 1986 converting three of his old tobacco barns into what he called his worm houses.

[00:08:34]He built long, shallow wooden beds 12 in deep, 4 ft wide, running the length of each barn. He ordered his first batch of red wiggler worms from a supplier in Florida, 50 lb of worms, which sounds like very little, but represents roughly 25,000 individual animals.

[00:08:53]He hauled in bedding material, aged horse manure from a stable three counties over, shredded newspaper, straw, and kitchen scraps.

[00:09:01]He kept the beds moist, but not wet.

[00:09:04]He kept the temperature between 55° and 77° F, the range in which red wigglers and Dr. Sheffield's letters that worms will double their population roughly every 60 to 90 days under ideal conditions.

[00:09:22]By the spring of 1987, his three barns held an estimated 2 million worms.

[00:09:28]That was the summer Dale Pruitt leaned over the fence and said Everett had lost his mind.

[00:09:34]Pruitt wasn't the only one.

[00:09:36]At the Harlan County Feed Supply, where farmers gathered most Saturday mornings for coffee and conversation, Everett became a running joke.

[00:09:45]"How's your worm farm, Ev?" The laughter was not entirely unkind. These were men who had known Everett for decades, but it was real. The consensus was clear. A man desperate enough to farm worms was a man who had given up.

[00:10:00]Everett's wife, a sharp-tongued, deeply practical woman named Rosalind, was not entirely convinced, either. She supported her husband, but privately she had quietly taken a part-time bookkeeping job at a local insurance office to make sure the family had income while Everett pursued what she privately referred to as his worm experiment. Their son, Marcus, a 24-year-old with no interest in farming, had already moved to Cincinnati for a factory job. The farm felt like it was down to Everett and his stubbornness.

[00:10:33]But something was happening out in those dead fields.

[00:10:37]In the spring of 1988, Everett began the second phase of his plan.

[00:10:42]He started spreading worm castings harvested from the barn beds onto a test section of 40 acres in his worst depleted field. He applied them at a rate of about 2 tons per acre, working them into the top 6 inches of soil with a tractor disc. Then he planted a simple cover crop of crimson clover, not for harvest, but to add organic matter back into the ground.

[00:11:05]He did not plant corn.

[00:11:07]He did not plant anything for sale that year on those 40 acres.

[00:11:11]That was the hardest part, watching usable farmland sit without a cash crop while the bank statements grew grimmer.

[00:11:18]But he also began releasing worm colonies directly into the field soil, inoculating the ground the way you might add starter culture to a batch of sourdough bread.

[00:11:28]By late summer of 1988, Everett was seeing something he hadn't seen in 20 years.

[00:11:34]He walked his 40-acre test plot after a rain, bent down, and pushed his fingers into the soil.

[00:11:40]It had a different feel. Looser, darker, more crumble to it.

[00:11:46]And there were worms.

[00:11:48]Not the millions he'd eventually have, but they were there, working, multiplying, doing what worms have done for 350 million years.

[00:11:59]He brought Dr. Sheffield out to the farm that October.

[00:12:02]The scientist drove from Columbus, Ohio, in a beat-up Ford pickup, spent 2 days taking soil samples, and sat at Everett's kitchen table drinking coffee while Rosalind fed him ham and biscuits.

[00:12:14]His assessment was cautious but unmistakable.

[00:12:18]The biological activity in that 40-acre plot had increased by nearly 400% in a single season.

[00:12:26]"You're on to something, Everett," Sheffield said. "Keep going."

[00:12:30]The year 1990 was the turning point.

[00:12:34]Everett planted his 40 recovered acres in corn that spring. He applied no synthetic fertilizer, not a dollar's worth. He used only worm castings and a modest amount of natural compost.

[00:12:46]His neighbors, watching from the road, waited for the inevitable failure.

[00:12:51]The corn came in at 187 bushels per acre.

[00:12:56]The county average that year was 112 bushels per acre.

[00:13:01]Dale Pruitt, to his immense credit, did not pretend the numbers weren't what they were.

[00:13:06]He drove over one September afternoon, stood at the edge of Everett's field, and stared for a long time without saying anything.

[00:13:14]Finally, he turned to Everett and said, "I owe you an apology."

[00:13:19]Word travels fast in farm country.

[00:13:22]By 1991, three neighboring farms had approached Everett asking to buy worm castings.

[00:13:29]He sold them at $85 per ton, more than twice what a bag of synthetic nitrogen cost per equivalent unit, but farmers were willing to pay because they could see what it was doing to Everett's land.

[00:13:41]By 1993, Everett had converted all 280 acres to what he called worm-assisted farming.

[00:13:50]He had expanded his barn operation to six buildings.

[00:13:53]He was selling castings commercially to farms in three counties and had started a modest mail order business for garden scale bags, which Rosalind ran from the kitchen table using a telephone and a stack of paper order forms.

[00:14:07]The farm that had been losing money since the mid-1970s turned its first profit in 1991.

[00:14:14]By 1995, Everett Calloway's operation was the most financially stable farm in Harlan County.

[00:14:21]Now, you might be wondering, how does this actually work?

[00:14:25]What is it about a worm that can do what decades of modern chemistry couldn't?

[00:14:30]The answer lies in something soil scientists call the soil food web.

[00:14:36]Healthy soil is not a static medium. It is a dynamic, living community in which every organism plays a role.

[00:14:44]Bacteria decompose organic matter into basic nutrients.

[00:14:48]Fungi form networks called mycorrhizae that extend a plant's root system far beyond what the roots could reach alone, essentially acting as a second root system that delivers water and phosphorus from deep in the soil.

[00:15:01]Protozoa eat bacteria and release nitrogen in a form that plant roots can absorb. Nematodes control bacterial populations and cycle nutrients through the system.

[00:15:12]Earthworms sit near the top of this underground community as what scientists call ecosystem engineers.

[00:15:19]Their physical burrowing creates the structure, the channels, the pores, the aggregated clumps of soil particles that all the other organisms need to do their work. Their castings are not just nutrient-rich, they are populated with billions of beneficial microorganisms per gram, essentially seeding the soil with the living community it needs.

[00:15:40]When you apply synthetic fertilizers heavily and repeatedly, you disrupt this web. The high nitrogen concentrations can kill or suppress soil bacteria. The pH changes can damage fungal networks.

[00:15:53]The absence of organic matter because synthetic systems don't require you to add compost or crop residue starves the microbial community. Over time, the soil becomes biologically empty. And biologically empty soil is fragile soil.

[00:16:10]Worms and the castings they produce essentially restart the biological engine.

[00:16:16]There's also the matter of water retention.

[00:16:19]Biologically active soil, with its complex structure of channels and aggregates, can absorb and hold far more rainfall than compacted depleted soil.

[00:16:29]This matters enormously in drought years and in heavy rain years alike. The soil acts as a sponge rather than a hard floor. Studies conducted in the 1990s found that fields with healthy earthworm populations retained up to 40% more water per rainfall event than chemically farmed fields, which dramatically reduces both drought loss and erosion.

[00:16:51]Everett Callaway died in 2009 at the age of 84.

[00:16:55]He had farmed every year of his adult life right up until the spring of his 83rd year when his knees finally gave out.

[00:17:03]By that time, what he had started in those three Kentucky barns in 1986 had become something much larger than one man's experiment.

[00:17:13]In 2001, the University of Kentucky's College of Agriculture formally documented the Callaway farm as a case study in sustainable soil regeneration.

[00:17:23]It became part of the curriculum for agricultural science students, the same curriculum in a beautiful circle that had originally sent that textbook home with his daughter Patricia all those years ago.

[00:17:36]His son Marcus, the one who had gone to Cincinnati for factory work, came back to the farm in 1997 and learned the operation from his father.

[00:17:46]After Everett's death, Marcus and his own son Darnell expanded what was by then called Callaway Earth works into a regional supplier of vermicompost products serving farms, nurseries, and home gardeners across six states.

[00:18:01]The Saturday morning coffee crowd at the Harlan County Feed and Supply eventually stopped laughing about worm farming.

[00:18:08]By the early 2000s, the conversation had shifted. Now it was the older farmers who would say, "Carefully, and without making too much of it, you know, I've been thinking about what Callaway did with those worms." The younger farmers, the ones who had grown up watching Everett's results, didn't need to be convinced at all.

[00:18:28]Today, vermiculture and vermicomposting are recognized globally as serious, scientifically supported agricultural practices.

[00:18:37]The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has cited earthworm-based soil restoration as one of the critical tools for combating global soil degradation, a problem that threatens food security on a planetary scale.

[00:18:51]Given that it is estimated that roughly 1/3 of the world's topsoil has been damaged or destroyed by poor farming practices over the past century.

[00:19:00]In the United States alone, the organic farming movement of which worm-assisted farming is a central pillar has grown from a fringe practice to a $40 billion smaller There are several lessons woven into this story that go beyond farming.

[00:19:17]The first is about the patience of nature.

[00:19:19]The soil did not recover overnight.

[00:19:22]It took years of consistent, unglamorous work maintaining those barn beds, hauling compost, releasing worm colonies, waiting through a full crop season with no cash return. Real restoration, whether of land or of anything else that has been depleted over a long time, does not happen quickly.

[00:19:41]The second is about the limits of quick fixes. The chemical farming revolution of the postwar era was not malicious. It genuinely fed people and lifted farm incomes in the short term, but it treated a complex living system as though it were a simple machine, and the consequences accumulated slowly, invisibly, until they couldn't be ignored. The lesson is worth applying broadly when we override the natural systems that have developed over millions of years. We should be humble about what we might be losing.

[00:20:13]The third lesson is personal.

[00:20:15]Everett Calloway had no college degree, no research grant, no institutional backing.

[00:20:21]What he had was curiosity, a willingness to read a daughter's college textbook and take seriously what it said, and the courage to act on what he learned even when everyone around him called it foolishness. The gap between a crazy idea and a revolutionary one is often nothing more than the willingness to endure the laughter long enough to find out.

[00:20:41]Dale Pruitt lived until 2003.

[00:20:44]In his later years, he was known to tell people, without any embarrassment, that Everett Calloway was the smartest farmer he ever knew.

[00:20:53]He was right.

[00:20:55]The next time you walk across a lawn, or dig in a garden, or drive past a farm field, think about what's happening 3 in below the surface.

[00:21:04]Think about the invisible community of organisms doing work that no factory on earth can replicate, churning, cycling, building, feeding.

[00:21:13]And think about a stubborn old man in Kentucky who believed, against all the laughter, that the answer to what ailed his dying land was already there in the soil. It just needed to be brought back to life.

[00:21:26]Everett Callaway didn't invent anything.

[00:21:28]Worms have been doing their work since long before there were farms or farmers or human beings of any kind.

[00:21:35]All he did was stop fighting nature and start listening to it.

[00:21:39]That turns out to have been more than enough.

[00:21:43]If you found this story valuable, share it with someone who loves the land or who simply wants to understand a little more about the world beneath our feet.

[00:21:51]And if you grow anything at all, even a single pot of tomatoes on a windowsill, consider what a handful of worm castings might do for it.

[00:22:00]Everett would be pleased.