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The best medium for growing healthy plants is a rich, loose, and fertile soil. Earthworms make a significant contribution by loosening the soil and providing plant nutrients in their droppings. When they burrow, worms aerate the soil to provide essential oxygen for bacteria, fungi, and other micro-organisms required for soil fertility. An earthworm can digest approximately half its own bodyweight of soil each day. Given that average populations number hundreds of worms per square metre, the combined effect will be the processing and movement of large volumes of earth each year. Earthworms concentrate essential nutrients and minerals from soil as it passes through their digestive tract. Their expelled waste, also known as cast, contains many...

The other night, I became frustrated with my football coverage so switched between documentary channels on the cable network. I managed to catch the second half of a program about earthworms. Prior to final credits, the narrator emphasized the significance of the earthworm’s contribution towards maintaining soil fertility. He then suggested that soil fertility was crucial for the long term sustainability of life on earth. Unfortunately, he repeated the words monotonically and they became divorced from any reasonable sense of urgency. As a keen student of organic principles, I’ve been concerned about the long term consequences of poor quality soils for several decades. Irrespective of the demand for organically grown produce, there...