12/21 - You want to grow worms?

At Forgotten Voices International, empowerment comes in many forms.  Sometimes, as I described yesterday, it comes in the form of a small loan to help a mother begin an income generating small business.  And other times, empowerment means growing earth worms.

Yeah, that's right.  Worms.

Farming God’s Way (FGW), an organization in partnership with Forgotten Voices in Zimbabwe, is involved in training and equipping the rural poor of Africa to realize the God given potential of their land. It is the goal of FGW to bring about a great harvest in righteousness and faithful stewardship by uniting the Word of God with agricultural discipleship.

Farming God’s Way employs technologies that conform to the way God maintains and sustains His natural order.  By understanding how God interacts with His creation to promote plant growth, FGW has initiated simple farming techniques that are extremely appropriate for the 700 million poor farmers in Africa who cannot afford expensive machinery, fertilizers, and related supplies.

Specific emphasis is placed on training community leaders to effectively utilize the wonderful treasures God has provided to increase agricultural yields without expensive imported inorganic fertilizers and harmful chemical compounds.  

Included in these natural treasures are earthworms and other wonderfully abundant microbial life in the soil.  So, some time ago Forgotten Voices partnered with FGW to build a wormery.

Yeah, that's right.  A wormery.

What exactly is a wormery?  I'm very glad you asked.  A wormery is a special building in which earth worms can be grown - almost like a green house, execpt (again) there are worms instead of plants.   In this pilot program, FGW is studying how to breed earthworms and make inexpensive and very efficient composts and manure with the realization that a combination of these treasures – applied with God's wisdom – will bring great

 breakthroughs for the people of Southern Africa.  It is the final goal of FGW to provide those who will receive

 training with some of this nutrient material in order that they may begin fertilizing their crops with earthworms and create similar nutrients in their home environments.  Forgotten Voices is extremely excited about exploring and implementing this technology especially since it is appropriate and does not require millions of dollars in development costs. At present, FGW is constructing a simple wormery that will help produce the highly fertile earthworm castings (manure) which will form the base material for farm trial plots.  The pictures which accompany this post chronicle its construction.

I am so thankful for our FGW partners who continue to serve the people of Zimbabwe by finding new and creative ways to help them provide food for their families.  Already, people have traveled from all over southern Africa to the FGW training center to visit the wormery and learn about the power of earthworms.  Who would have ever thought that earthworms would be a critical element in fighting starvation!?

Remember, if you are still looking for that unusual Christmas gift, we would love for you to help Forgotten Voices to provide more worms to farmers in Zimbabwe.  Please click here to give.

Worms and blessings,

Jesse