[00:00:00] Michael Hawk: Today's episode is one of the more encouraging and hopeful conversations I've had The pleasure of recording. My guest is Sam Baker, co-founder of Wriggle Brew, a company on a mission to combat one of the most insidious environmental issues we face today.

Toxic algal blooms. These blooms occur globally devastating everything from our local inland lakes to the vast expanses of the Gulf of Mexico. And even here in my neighborhood, the San Francisco Bay has seen a few algal blooms in recent years. They create vast dead zones that choke out life and their leading cause is something you might not expect synthetic fertilizers.

In this episode, Sam and I get into the details of why synthetic fertilizers leave a trail of destruction. And why they become so deeply ingrained in large scale farming. We will explore how Wriggle Brew has developed a game changing solution by figuring out how to scale up worm casting production into a stable liquid form. That's a critical breakthrough for a sustainable agriculture, and we don't stop there. Did you know that [00:01:00] some insect larva can actually break down plastics?

Sam shares how he and his team are working to replicate that process in bioreactors. It's an inspiring look at how nature and innovation can come together to solve some of the biggest problems we face. This is a truly fascinating and hopeful discussion, and I can't wait for you to hear it. You can find Wriggle Brew and Sam and learn more about their work, in fact, at riggle brew.com.

And you can find them at Riggle Brew on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. Now, without further delay, Sam Baker.

Sam, thank you so much for joining me today.

[00:01:33] Sam Baker: . Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to talk worms.

[00:01:36] Michael Hawk: Yeah, well, the Worms as a dedicated topic is a brand new one for Nature's Archive, but I think the bigger picture that we'll get into it it touches on a few themes that we've had in the past in terms of regenerative agriculture, healthy soils, these, these different things. So I'm excited to hear about it from the worm's eye perspective, I guess in this case.

[00:01:59] Sam Baker: Yeah. [00:02:00] Well, there's a lot to discuss with worms. It, it's everything from the earthworms themselves to how they're affecting the soil, how they're affecting the ecology and what we can do with earthworms to benefit agriculture and humanity in general. So there's, there's a lot to talk about.

[00:02:15] Michael Hawk: as alluded to in the introduction, you founded this startup that relates to this, and, and we'll talk more about that later, but when you look at any kind of unique passion or pursuit in life a question that always comes to mind is like, how did you get to this point? Like, what, what led you to, begin this endeavor?

Have, have you always been interested in nature and dirt and soil and, and these sorts of things? Or was there like an epiphany at some point that opened your eyes?

[00:02:43] Sam Baker: Yes and no. And I think it is important to go through the origin story because I've got a kind of an odd startup with a very odd mission and purpose and methods, but it all makes a lot more sense once you realize where it began.

So I was an Eagle Scout, I spent a lot of time camping [00:03:00] and I was also just very interested in the environment from a young age. Where I live in Florida, we have a lot of beautiful springs and rivers and lakes and just good natural stuff to appreciate. And as a boy scout, as an eagle scout, I spend a lot of time kind of digging around in the dirt for various purposes, whether it's building fire pits or latrines or just having fun.

And I eventually when I went to to college to UCF, university of Central Florida, I ended up getting a, my first job at UCF was a nano materials researcher working on compost. We were working on turning compost into biochar and things like that because I'd worked a lot, like I said, as in Boy Scouts with, with compost and stuff.

And around the time I was doing all of that, I had been going fishing with my grandfather a lot. Like I said, Florida has all these lakes, and one of the lakes that we used to go fishing at a [00:04:00] lot was this. The small little pond. It was nearby the coast. He had been going there with his father, and I think his grandfather, like many generations back, that lake.

One day we went to it, all the fish there were dead, like pretty much all wiped out. The reason all the fish were dead at this lake was because of something called fertilizer runoff. So in Florida we develop a lot of housing. Like we have all these neighborhoods going up. We have a lot of nurseries and farms, and most of these people are predominantly using synthetic fertilizers.

So things like nitrogen and phosphorous compounds. And when they use those, the excess tends to, to run off, to move through the soil and end up in bodies of water. And in our case, it ended up in our pond where it increased the, the quantity of algae to such a point that it choked out all the fish. this is happening in Florida, but also throughout the country on a massive scale that is often underappreciated.

[00:05:00] In Florida, we actually have such large algal blooms during the summer that you can see it from space. But all of this is driven by fertilizer. And so it got me really interested in trying to understand where fertilizer is coming from, why we're using it the way we're using it, what its impacts are on soil, and ultimately trying to find a way to replace it to replace synthetic fertilizers with something that wouldn't cause all this damage to the ecology.

And the answer ended up being earthworms.

[00:05:30] Michael Hawk: Yeah, so we'll connect those dots a little bit. But on your point about the algal blooms here, where I live in the San Francisco Bay area, we, for many years had been very lucky and really hadn't had any mass algal blooms. And I think a lot of people just really wouldn't talk about it because it's like, okay, that's not jinx it, we've been lucky and unfortunately a few years ago we had our first one and now it's an annual or, or multi times a year event.

And my understanding, maybe you can help me with [00:06:00] this, but when, the fertilizer helps promote the growth of, of these algae and they take the oxygen out of the water leading to kind of like an asphyxiation, that's a hard word for me, apparently. Is, is that roughly what happens there that that leads to the fish death or is there another element to it?

[00:06:17] Sam Baker: there? There are a few elements to it. But the big, but the big one is we, we call it eutrofication. The big one is you get such a mat of, of algae that builds up that it literally just chokes out the water.

So in order for, for, for animals to get oxygen in, in water water has to diffuse either from the atmosphere or from, other sources. So there has to be kind of movement of air through the water column. That, that can't happen if you have basically a barrier of algae on the top.

[00:06:46] Michael Hawk: so it's the mat itself that is the biggest impact.

[00:06:50] Sam Baker: It's, I don't know if it's necessarily the biggest impact, but it's, it's the final nail in the coffin in, in any case, there, so a lot of these algae also produce toxins as they die. [00:07:00] And that when, when, especially when you have a massive die off of them, because yet they run out of fertilizer, they drop all these essentially like phyto toxins into the water column, and that can cause a shock to animals as well.

And so the impact is just catastrophic. And you have all these fish dying. And, and of course, one of the things that's really bad about all of this is as the fish begin to die in larger and larger numbers, disease spreads more easily. And you also have a collapse of the food web. So it, it's a very much a negative feedback loop that occurs.

And the, the impact on the water. So like, let's say the San Francisco Bay or, or in my home, the Tampa Bay, right? You have all this fertilizer reaching into the Gulf. And in fact, I, I wish I could show you some of the pictures of it. 'cause it is really crazy to see it from space. It's literally this, this big red creeping cloud.

[00:07:53] Michael Hawk: if you have pictures, I'd be happy to put 'em in the show notes 

[00:07:56] Sam Baker: Yeah, I, I'll send it to you. 'cause it's, it's a shocking [00:08:00] image. And it's the, the, the real horror of it is that by the time it actually reaches the bay, it has already the, these fertilizers, these synthetic compounds have already gone through a huge amount of soil.

So they've been, they've been destroying their way through the soil before they actually reach the water. Because the, the nitrogen, the excess nitrogen phosphorus, when it's in the soil column, it, it destroys microbes. It destroys decomposers, it kills earthworms, it kills isopods. So it's killing all these other organisms before it even reaches the ocean.

It's then causing the part that we see. So that is only like the tail end of the damage. And that's, that's the scary part. And of course in agriculture, that's the, that's the hell of it. Because when you're using these fertilizers and these herbicides and other compounds, you are killing a huge number of soil microbes and earthworms and decomposers.

And so the consequences, the soil is [00:09:00] weaker for using these compounds and the next season. Those animals, those bacteria and those earthworms not being present means you need to use more fertilizer and it loops like that.

[00:09:14] Michael Hawk: So I, I think then that leads us a little bit to your goal is to break that

feedback loop 

[00:09:22] Sam Baker: Precisely.

[00:09:23] Michael Hawk: I'm, I'm gonna keep saying this before we get there. I think there's still a little more foundational work to do here with with what the problem is.

[00:09:29] Sam Baker: the, yeah. 

[00:09:30] Michael Hawk: When we talk about, nitrogen and phosphorus and, these, these chemicals that are necessary for, for plants to live what makes the synthetic nature, of synthetic fertilizers harmful as compared to say an organic fertilizer?

[00:09:47] Sam Baker: It's all a matter of, of chemistry really, at the end of the day. So synthetic fertilizers, when they, when they were first discovered, were something of a revelation to the agricultural world because nitrogen, for example, is the basis of [00:10:00] all protein. It's also the basis of chlorophyll. So when plants get access to higher levels of, of available nitrogen in the soil, they tend to bloom, they tend to to grow very large, very rapidly.

They tend to become very green. So you have a lot of really good visible results, and you can increase yields quite a bit by, by adding nitrogen. But nitrogen is like an anabolic steroid for plants. So these nitrogen compounds are things like urea and ammonia. They're very, very small molecules.

They're very reactive. Plants can pick up on them very easily, but we almost never dose the right amount of them to the plant itself. So these compounds, these very reactive compounds that naturally don't exist for very long in excess end up in the soil, around the plant. They're very mobile because as I said, they're very small, small molecules move very easily through the soil.

It's, it kind of like, we can imagine the soil is like a, a tennis net, let's say. [00:11:00] And these molecules of urea or ammonia are like grains of rice. They're gonna pass right through the tennis net. That is the soil. The soil is not dense enough, it's not interconnected enough to, to catch and keep these materials.

[00:11:12] Michael Hawk: we think of it as solid, but it's not really solid. If it, if it were completely solid, water would not be able to penetrate into the,

[00:11:19] Sam Baker: In fact, the, the average top soil is, is something like 60 to 70% air. It's, it's mostly empty space. It's, that's why it's spongy. That's why you can kinda squish it in your hands. And so molecules move through that, that soil matrix, they can move through that depending on certain conditions.

Urea and ammonia being very small, can move through it very easily, which has the benefit for plants of meaning that if there's too much nitrogen around them and rain comes, it will wash that nitrogen away from the plant, which is nice for the plant. It's bad for everything else. The same thing is applies to phosphorus.

Most of the phosphorus compounds we use are, are phosphates or they are [00:12:00] phosphoric acid derivatives. And so again, very small molecules, very reactive, very mobile organic fertilizers, organic nutrition that plants get from, from like, for example, humic acid. Which is what good quality top soil tends to be made out of.

When you see like dark rich soil that comes from the IC content, the average humic acid molecule is about 185 atoms compared to urea, which is like four or five. So there's a massive difference in the size of these molecules, which means when there's too much humic acid around, it's much more slowly washed away by water.

It cannot move through the soil matrix as easily. If we go back to the, the tennis net analogy, remember the urea is like grains of rice. Well, the humic acid is a tennis ball, or it's a volleyball. It's gonna get caught by the net. It's gonna be stopped by it, which means it doesn't, it easily wash away into waterways, which means it does tend to build up more easily, but it is also exponentially [00:13:00] less reactive.

Urea and ammonia react extremely quickly. They are just hyper reactive in comparison to something like humic acid, which a plant needs to put a little effort into. To break apart. So again, it's like the difference between like an anabolic steroid and a good steak. Both of these things are probably good for building muscle, but the anabolic steroid is gonna ha react a lot faster than the steak is.

Now I could tell you, which I would rather have, over the long run, but farmers maybe, they, they're raising crops. They, they want to see quick, quick turnaround.

[00:13:35] Michael Hawk: right, right there. And, and so the way the system is, so many farmers are living season to season as well. And yeah, so it's it's definitely tantalizing to, to go down that route. I, I don't know if you're familiar with Gabe Brown who wrote a book uh, from Dirt to Soil. He was a past podcast guest here actually on the show.

And very interesting to hear his. His own [00:14:00] personal story of converting to a, a regenerative agriculture practice. So I will, I'll link to that in the show notes as well. I don't want to take, take people away from this conversation, but I think it's a, it's a fascinating aside for anyone who's interested in in those trade offs that exist and, and what at least one North Dakota Farmer was able to do by taking this route of dropping the synthetics.

[00:14:23] Sam Baker: Yeah, it's, it's very challenging to do because as you say, farmers are many times season to season. That's their livelihood. It's their family's livelihood. It's three generations of, of people's livelihoods. So ultimately, if you have a 2000 acre farm, the price per acre is what keeps you in or outta business.

And nitrogen's pretty cheap per acre compared to, to organics. Someone might pay 150 bucks per acre for nitrogen and they might pay 250 for an equivalent organic. That's a massive difference. And that kind of difference is, is make or break for farmers. And the other thing is the synthetics [00:15:00] are tend to be.

Easier to predict their react, their interactions and reactions with plants are easier to predict because when you are providing one single nutrient, like let's say nitrogen or, or phosphorus, and, and that one single nutrient is something that a plant has a direct, single relationship with, it's a lot harder to, to say, okay, well phosphorus boosts growth 20%.

What does chicken litter do? What does, fish manure do? Fish manure has nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, all kinds of other random things in it. Organic compounds, amine, sometimes cytotoxins, like random things of, to various degrees. So it's a, it's a cocktail every time. Organic fertilizer, al are, they're always a cocktail and that cocktail is a lot harder to predict.

[00:15:48] Michael Hawk: Yeah, that's an important point too. I think that, for, for so many of us who are not involved in agriculture I think we probably have an overly simplified model of what it takes to, successfully grow [00:16:00] at scale. But there are complex calculations that go into like every, every plan and, every application, everything that happens in, in agriculture.

And that's something I, I, I don't tend to think about enough, but that's definitely true.

[00:16:14] Sam Baker: true. It's just, just the cost of diesel to move your truck or your tractor out to a certain distance in the field can have massive ramifications for, for the cost of the farm, a coolant for, for your tractor if it's infra or foliar if, if you are on a higher elevation or lower, if you have up slope or down slope, if, if you have more or less rain.

All these factors become extremely important elements of the successor failure of the farm and the less variability you have. In the product that you're applying to your crops, the easier it is for you to get consistent results. Like why? Why are kids like when you have like a little kid, right? They love chicken tenders.

They love chicken nuggets, right? Why do they love chicken nuggets and chicken tenders? [00:17:00] Strawberries are good, right? The natural foods are good, but chicken nuggets and chicken tenders are the same. Every time you go to McDonald's you get chicken nuggets. It's the same every single time. If mom makes you a bunch of strawberries or spinach puffs or whatever, it's gonna change a lot.

Fruits and vegetable, no. Two bananas are exactly the same. I've had a totally different banana every morning when I have one, right? Because like sometimes it's a little squishy, sometimes it's not. Not chicken nuggets. That stuff is consistent and kids love it, and it, and the same thing applies to everything in life.

We love consistency, we love predictability. We love going somewhere and knowing we're gonna have the same experience we had before. That means a lot to people, and for farmers it means even more because their livelihood is riding on it. It, it's an extremely challenging thing to get them to take a leap of faith and put it on the line to try something new because it will benefit other people.

It's not that farmers are [00:18:00] selfish or that they don't care about their soil. It's that they can't afford to, they can't afford to take that risk and end up committing economic suicide on a whim because it will impact a waterway, 50 miles away that they never see when it will impact their children or their, their family's legacy or their, their wife or their husband, et cetera.

Yeah.

[00:18:23] Michael Hawk: Thanks for bringing it back because I, I was just thinking if somebody had tuned in mid-conversation, it, it would've sounded like we were pitching synthetic fertilizers for the last couple of minutes. But I think really we're just showing the perspective of why they're so tantalizing for people.

So before we get into. The, the whys and hows for your product. You mentioned earlier that the, the humic acid will make soils look darker. I, I'm curious, like if you could just maybe both objectively and subjectively describe what healthy soil looks like.

[00:18:54] Sam Baker: make, Hmm, that's an interesting question. So healthy soil, we often talk about [00:19:00] humus and top soil as being the basis of good quality soil for growing things. Healthy soil is not necessarily soil that's good for agriculture. Those two things are, are a Venn diagram that don't always align. Soil can be healthy in Arizona and be terrible for agriculture.

Because, it's not meant necessarily to grow wheat or sorghum in Arizona. It's, it's meant to grow cactus and, and, and things of that nature. But generally speaking, when we're talking about agricultural soil, what we want to see is we want to see this dark color. We wanna see that dark rich, humus earth.

We, we are all kind of intuitively familiar with this. We've probably seen this from time to time, but it's when you go and you and you hold it and it's, it's soft, but crumbly a little bit. It has a texture that holds itself together when you squeeze it, but doesn't, isn't mud isn't, a com doesn't form a ball in your hand.

That's driven by hydrogen bonds, by the interaction between water molecules and the negatively charged humic acid [00:20:00] compounds in a clump of soil. But that's what you wanna see. That's the texture you're looking for. There's a certain moisture content that's, that's pretty good for most crops. It varies between what you're growing, but, but it's, it's that dark color.

It's that crumbly texture. It's the ability to almost sink your fingers into it. Not quite. They often, it's referred to as like silty loam. Have you ever seen the Soil triangle?

[00:20:24] Michael Hawk: No.

[00:20:25] Sam Baker: No. The soil triangle is a really, really interesting tool. This is something used in a lot of geoscience, but you should, you should look this up and, and, and see it, it shows the relationships between different kinds of soils.

And the best soil for growing traditionally is, is the silty loam. Silty, meaning that it, the particles are relatively small and loam, meaning that it's a, it's a lot of organic originated material, it's decayed plant matter. And that's what brings us back to, to earthworms, because earthworms are one of the single greatest.

Generators of [00:21:00] sty loam and of, of good soil. They actually produce, actively produce humic acid compounds in their gut. So they will eat through available biomass, like leaf litter and vegetables or chunks of plant, and they will process it through a really refined bacterial bioreactor, which is their gut into humic acid and fulvic acid, and a variety of these precursors of silty loam.

And they deposit them around. And as they move through the soil, they're not just producing these compounds, they're also cutting channels with their bodies through the soil matrix, which allows air oxygen to flow in, which keeps the, the soil aerobic, right? We don't want an anaerobic soil. We want oxygen to help bacteria live in there.

And it helps water to move through as well by creating these channels for rain water and, and excess water to. To irrigate a little bit and to spread more evenly through the soil. So the earthworm is a kind of tiny geo engineer and [00:22:00] also a biological generator of good quality soil, which is why historically in Europe crop rotation, one of the biggest things in crop rotation was letting fields sit fallow, sit unused for 20 odd years, because that's about the time it takes for an acre or more to get processed by earthworms back into essentially brand new silty loam, humic acid rich soil.

And it's why when Charles Darwin was first studying earthworms in the late 1880s and nineties, he kept remarking how the most productive farms and gardens he was seeing tended to have earthworms in the soil. And the farmers identified that as being a good sign.

[00:22:39] Michael Hawk: Oh, there's a whole bunch of different directions that I want to go here. We were talking, I think before we started, about how these conversations are, are often intertwined, circular you don't know where to start or, or end. And I'm at one of those points right now. So, I'm gonna stick with the, with the soil.

Piece for a moment. Then I want to get into the earthworms a little bit more. Looking [00:23:00] microscopically at the soil, obviously you can see earthworms without a microscope, but there's a lot going on in the soil beyond earthworms, a lot of life. And I'm curious again, do the compare and contrast of, of a healthy soil versus perhaps an unhealthy soil, what might it look like microscopically from a, like the organisms that you might find within that sample?

[00:23:24] Sam Baker: So to bring it back to healthy versus unhealthy soil agriculturally, we talk about like soil in the east, the Midwest, the great plains places where you'd expect to see earthworms. You should see them, you should see those guys. You should also see a good amount of fungi living in the soil.

Fungi is extremely important. Earthworms have a, they're, I mention them a lot because one, my business is based around them, but two, they do, they have a, almost a kind of keystone role and a lot of these different contexts. So the, the earthworm is geologically editing the soil by, [00:24:00] by cutting channels in it and by creating this physical, these physical changes.

But it's also biologically changing it because the earthworm not only is depositing these, these chemicals as it moves through the soil, these humanic acids, but it is also depositing the spores of fungi, the spores of bacteria, and typically the spores of very, very beneficial bacteria and fungi. So it's redistributing them.

Healthy soil is, is soil that has lots of life to it. It has. Beneficial bacteria in it. Bacillus bacteria are, are really one of the, the powerhouses in this realm. These are bacteria that are really important because they do things like fixed nitrogen. So we talked about how nitrogen is important for making, proteins and, and, photosynthesis.

But plants get their nitrogen naturally from nitrogen producing bacteria. So these guys do make tiny amounts of ammonia at the root zone for plants

[00:24:50] Michael Hawk: can you explain what, when you say fix nitrogen, that's one of those things that I think we toss around a lot, but, but it, it's an interesting concept, so I, I would love to hear your explanation of what that really [00:25:00] means.

[00:25:00] Sam Baker: It's a, it's not a very good verbiage. They call it fixing nitrogen. The nitrogen's not being, it's not being

[00:25:05] Michael Hawk: It wasn't broken.

[00:25:06] Sam Baker: it's being sequestered. Yeah. It's being broken. So we're taking nitrogen from the atmosphere and we're, we're breaking it apart to get free nitrogen, which is just. It's the same nitrogen, but it's now chemically more available.

So nitrogen that we breathe in the air, 78% of our atmosphere, that's all triple botted nitrogen that is molecular nitrogen into it's very, very strong gaseous material. And it is everywhere. And it's basically useless to everybody because it, it doesn't react with anything but nitrogen. The single atom is extremely reactive, and this has to do with its electron shell.

We don't need to get into the chemistry too much, but suffice to say, when you take atmospheric nitrogen, that double bond, that triple bonded into that, that double molecule, and you break that bond, one, a lot of energy is released, but two, you now have atoms or molecules of nitrogen [00:26:00] that have an enormous amount of potential to be rebo back into that triple bond.

And so some of that happens when, like when a, when a lightning strikes, for example, we get some of these nitrogen molecules cleaved by the force of the lightning strike and that excess. Nitrogen can, can sometimes bond with oxygen and form nitrogen dioxide and, and other oxide compounds, which can then be absorbed by bacteria in the soil.

So they actually absorb it basically breathe it in, and then through a variety of complicated biological processes, turn it into a soluble form, which they poop out around the root zone of plants. And we call those nitrogen fixing bacteria because I, I guess because they give a fix to the plant of its nitrogen.

So plants, like they said, they need nitrogen, but they have these bacteria that, that do all this chemical processing for them. The plant gets the nitrogen from the bacteria, and in exchange the bacteria is provided with sugars by the plant. So they have this [00:27:00] symbiosis. And actually the same thing applies with phosphorus.

And we're now finding there are, there are other interactions with other micro and macronutrients as well. But beyond that, there are also a variety of fungi who live in the soil, who plants employ to bring forward to them all kinds of other resources they find in the dirt. Plants also use fungi to defend their root systems.

They have a similar symbiosis. You defend my root systems, I'll provide you with complex sugars that you can't produce, so on and so forth. So healthy soil is full of all these different microbial businesses. We'll, we'll say it's full of all these different microbial or organizations, whether it's fungi or bacteria or other things available for plants when they start to grow, to take advantage of that, of that life and use it to, to its benefit, to solubilize phosphorus, to to fix nitrogen, to defend itself from pests, diseases, and pathogens and to explore the soil and, and bring in more nutrients.

[00:27:59] Michael Hawk: so [00:28:00] the flip side of this, so you have earthworms who are kind of like, keystone species, ecosystem engineers supporting all of this. And on the other side of the spectrum, you have synthetic fertilizers that are providing a, a quick fix to plants, but destroying this ecosystem in, in the soil food, web.

[00:28:18] Sam Baker: Exactly. And, and I've seen this happen numerous times in various farms, but you have earthworms, you have isopods, you have bacteria, you have fungi, you have got these, all these organisms, all these consortiums of symbiosis hanging out in the soil, and then you throw goa onto it. Concentrated liquid urea, a maniacal nitrogen fertilizer.

The plant is really happy for the next three months. Everything else in the soil around that plant melts. They all die. They, they get basically disintegrated by the, by the, by the impact on pH and by the toxicity of these nitrogen salts. The nitrogen compounds we use in our fertilizers are, are salts usually with nitrogen.

And the consequence [00:29:00] is mass death. The plant is doing great because it has the nitrogen that it needs to build. Its chlorophyll and its proteins visibly, so it looks really big, but it's very hollow growth because nitrogen's not the end all be all of nutrition. There are 13 micron macronutrients that are of great importance to plants.

So you get this huge bloom and now the soil is dead. So next season you're gonna need to do it again. If you want the plant to bloom big. And just because the nitrogen has made it bloom big doesn't mean that the actual nutritive qualities of the plant or the actual health qualities, the plant are very good.

A, a really strong example of this is we look at in Florida or in California, our citrus crop, the average orange we eat today has six times less nutrition in it than in orange from the 1960s to seventies, and that means six times less. Vitamin C, vitamin D, things of that nature are literally in lower quantity.

Per orange by a [00:30:00] factor of like six or seven. And that is driven by the fact that we are growing more oranges than ever in California and places like that. But those oranges are being grown increasingly in depleted soil. So if there is no micro or secondary nutrition in that soil because you've killed all the earthworms and you've killed all the bacteria and all the fungi that, that bring those things to the plants, then the nitrogen and phosphorus you throw on the orange tree will make it bloom and produce lots of oranges.

But those oranges will, will be hollow. They won't, they won't have the health that you need.

[00:30:33] Michael Hawk: Yeah, I didn't know that it was so extreme, and I imagine that, that you, you picked oranges probably because there was a study that actually looked into this. But, but I've definitely heard this across, across, tomatoes and, other crops as well. It's similar story. I.

[00:30:48] Sam Baker: and well, in fact, it's, it's not, it's not even as bad in the US as it is in many other countries. So in fact, in India and China, where rice is being grown. Rice has been really impacted by the use of phosphorus because phosphoric [00:31:00] acids tend to bond to zinc, right? They bond to zinc and form zinc phosphates, which are insoluble, which plants cannot absorb.

So in those cases, they're not, it's not even just the destruction of the soil biome that's actually causing nutrients not to be absorbed by the plants. It's the actual chemical interaction between the fertilizer and the micronutrients. And the consequence of this in India and China is that something like now 4% of all the world's child deaths, so children's, deaths among, among young children are driven now by zinc deficiency in the rice crop because zinc deficiency leads to immune failure.

So they're eating the same or greater amounts of rice in these rural villages as their parents were, because their rice crop is doing fantastic. 'cause they're using phosphorus fertilizers and then they're getting immune immune deficiencies and dying in the hundreds of thousands. that's extremely tragic because a, as far as everyone in that system can see, they've done everything right.

We're feeding our kids more food than we had. We're using fertilizers [00:32:00] that are making greater yields than we ever had before. And our kids are getting sick and dying in at, at, at higher rates. And it's because the rice that's being produced has no zinc in it. And that is entirely a factor. The, it's an unintended consequence.

It's an unforeseen consequence of the use of these phosphorus compounds.

[00:32:18] Michael Hawk: Wow, that's, that's crazy. I had not heard that. And definitely eye-opening. 

[00:32:23] Sam Baker: I

[00:32:24] Michael Hawk: I don't know, that's a hard transition to come off of, but let's get optimistic now and, and talk a little bit about what you're doing with, your company and with worms to help provide alternatives to this.

I.

[00:32:36] Sam Baker: this. Yeah. Well 'cause. It is a hard thing to get off of. Right. How do you go from child death to, to talking about, oh, well, here's the bright future. The, the bright future that we have in front of us is that we do know these problems exist. Now we know that fertilizers do have these negative impacts on soil and on food, and on the health of, of our plants.

And the good news is we've [00:33:00] known that for a while. I guess that's good and bad news. And so when I was first interested in trying to find us an alternative to synthetic fertilizers, I was very fortunate that a lot of the ground has already been tread by previous researchers, earthworms.

As we said, there's a lot of existing research that tells us just how amazing they are for soil, and specifically how amazing their manure is. The, the worm castings, so earthworms, as they move through the soil, they're generating this manure, these castings, because a huge part of their survival strategy is essentially making good fertilizer for plants because.

As earthworms live, they need to eat plant matter and so do their, following generations, their their offspring. So the manure they produce is specifically keyed to make plants as healthy as possible. So there's, more leaf litter and stuff for them in their descendants to eat.

It's very, very symbiotic relationship. We were looking at, is there a way we can take those worm castings that are, produced in vast quantities by [00:34:00] worms and use that for farming because, and it turns out a lot of people have been doing stuff like that using worm castings. But the problem has been for years that worm castings and manure in general, there's, they're, they're a solid material.

And most farms have infrastructure meant for liquid. Most farms work with irrigated systems or booms or foliar systems. They, because it's easy to deliver synthetic fertilizers that way. So it's very hard to ask a farmer to not only change the way he, he fertilizes, so like. Not only get rid of the chemicals he's using and swap them in for an organic material, but also change all the infrastructure around how he delivers that material.

That's, that's a bridge too far. We thought we wanted to find a way to take worm castings this organic material and make it deliverable to the field, to the farm. And the way we managed to figure out to do that was you make what's called a worm tea. You take the worm casting, this is not a beverage.

You take the worm casting and you brew it in liquid with, [00:35:00] with water to make this, this liquid fertilizer. And there have been a lot of studies that show that this stuff, when you compare the use rates is just as good if not far better than these synthetic fertilizers. And if you can take your worm castings and soak it in water to make a worm casting tea, why is that not, that seems fairly straightforward.

Why is that not being done on a mass scale? And the answer to that is that. They have no shelf life. Organic fertilizers do not have shelf stability. And this is, we get back into the chemistry a little bit here, but nitrogen and ammonia, phosphorus, those types of things, they never go bad. Microbes never start eating them inside of the bottle or inside of a, the super sack or whatever you store them in because like honey, there's so much of the nitrogen or the phosphorus there that nothing can survive in it.

Organic fertilizers are, they're not the same. Remember they're a consortium, they're a cocktail. So it's a lot easier for bacteria to survive inside of [00:36:00] worm castings or worm casting tea or a compost tea, which means the average shelf life for compost tea fertilizers is like 24 to 48 hours. That's, that's impossible to work with.

So I was working in nanomaterials lab with Gabe. We said, alright, what if we can find a way to, to lengthen that shelf life significantly. People have done this with other things In the past, milk used to have a shelf life of a similar length until Louis Pasteur came along and came up with pasteurization.

So there's gotta be a way to essentially pasteurize compost to your worm tea and make it shelf stable. And that's what over a couple years we were able to figure out how to do. We started giving that to farmers. They had some really amazing results. And eventually the shelf stable worm tea, we were able to start improving it by finding ways to add new microbes and new bacteria into it to make it even stronger.

And now we have a fertilizer that is actually being used by large row crop farmers, growing soy and corn and other things [00:37:00] successfully with the same infrastructure they used to have with an organic fertilizer.

[00:37:05] Michael Hawk: So what kind of scale are you able to produce this at these days and, and how do you see that progressing in the future?

[00:37:12] Sam Baker: That's a very good question.

I mean, When we started, right, we were. We were at a garage scale, 'cause we were working in a lab and then working at my mom's house. So we were making like a couple hundred gallons last year. We did 30,000 gallons. We have a, our own little warehouse and production facility now, which is really nice. 30,000 gallons is enough to feed many, many thousands of acres.

Next year we're aiming to do at a hundred thousand gallons of production. And, and it scales quite easily from there. We're not using super specialized equipment. We're not using stuff that is, hyper advanced, produced by custom fabrication shops. It's more or less all off the shelf parts.

So it's extremely scalable and that has allowed us to keep the price low. And, and that's what's really critical about this because another element is that organic fertilizers, aside from often having weird [00:38:00] infrastructure requirements, not having good shelf life or being, inconsistent in the results, they also tend to be expensive.

And so all of that prevents farmers from adopting them. But we are producing it in bulk from worm castings, which is a product of feeding worms, farm waste, or, or, or leaf litter and things like that. So we are actually able to keep our price per gallon lower than many synthetic fertilizers while being shelf stable, while having similar or better results than them and being good for the ecology.

So when you have all of those things, it's been a lot easier for farmers to adopt the use of our fertilizer than, than than lots of other organic fertilizers.

[00:38:40] Michael Hawk: And are, are you actually raising these worms yourself or do you have a, like a partner that gives you the castings that then you, you create the tea? I'm, I'm, I'm assuming it takes some time for the worms to produce their castings and it probably takes some significant space.

[00:38:55] Sam Baker: It does, but fortunately there are actually numerous worm farmers, [00:39:00] so people whose, whose jobs it is to, to farm worms.

We work with a worm farmer in Wisconsin. We work with another one. A couple in Florida. A few like all over the country, and there are people whose entire occupation it is, is to, to raise worms to produce the castings. And so we are able to buy castings from them in bulk, and we use that in our brewing process.

We do raise some of our own worms for the purposes of experimentation and to, to make small amounts of castings. But we pretty much just focus on the brewing side of things and of course the research side of things.

[00:39:32] Michael Hawk: and you mentioned that some of these farmers were seeing equivalent or perhaps even better results. How do you measure that?

[00:39:40] Sam Baker: that? There's a lot of ways you can measure it. One is, is just yield, are they producing more food? If you're growing soy, how many beans are you producing per plant? We've seen that number go up significantly. We've also seen the, the pubescent characteristics of the plants improve.

So that's, the color of them, the texture of the [00:40:00] leaf. The size of the plant in general, those are good things to look for. Size of the root structure. Also, how well one field does compared to another. So cross comparison, A versus B. You have one field where we're treating it with wriggle brew.

We have another field where we're just treating it with traditional stuff. Maybe there's a drought that year. Maybe there's some adverse condition that affects both fields. How does one field fair compared to another? On nearly every test we've run, the wriggle brew has done favorably, very favorably compared to the, to the synthetic fertilizers.

And that's because the wriggle brew, the worm tea. The worm castings doesn't just have some nitrogen available in it, in the form of the humic acid, the large molecules that the plants can use to build themselves up. But it also has all these other nutrients, secondary micronutrients that that plants need to have true full health.

And as a consequence, we're seeing farmers have better drought resistance, better stress resistance. Getting away with using a [00:41:00] little less water and still getting better yields. And that makes a huge difference because even a, even a 2% improvement in yield extrapolated across an entire farm is massive.

It's, it's an enormous change. And if you can couple that with a, a product that's 5% cheaper, 10% cheaper, those become massive gains for a farmer.

[00:41:21] Michael Hawk: And you just touched on something very briefly there that. Made my ears perk up because I, I recall a characterization that in healthy soil, this kind of nice aerated loose soil that water retention is usually better. So by keeping the soil healthy through avoiding synthetic fertilizers, it sounds like you're implying that, farmers are able to get away with using less water.

[00:41:47] Sam Baker: that, that's precisely right. And in fact, I don't mean to imply that I, I'd like to state that outright farmers are getting away with, with less water use. While using Wriggle Brew. And the reason is because as soil quality improves, [00:42:00] like you say, it's, it, you have this better soil matrix that, that holds moisture in.

Worm castings are one of the greatest materials for, moisture retention. , We've done a lot of tests with it compared to various kinds of soil substrates. It is amazing. It's very, very hydrophilic. It brings water in. This is partly because the humic acid compounds themselves are negatively charged.

So they, they have this strong hydrogen bonding, but they are, they're also just very spongy in, in texture. And so you get a good amount of water retention and the impact on that, on a grand scale is that farmers could be saving water while using this product. And that that can have impacts not just on their bottom line, but also ecologically speaking because farmers many times are drawing their water from local sources.

Here in Florida, of course we have an aquifer and the more we use that aquifer up, the harder it is for it to regenerate. Yeah, it's, it's a big impact. That's something that's, that we've seen is very, very helpful. And worm castings themselves are also just great [00:43:00] for this, for this purpose as well.

And of course we can see the opposite in soils that have been blasted with synthetics. They're like sand almost. They, they look very sandy. They, they have a very, what carbon is there is desiccated usually. So you have like whole chunks of dead desiccated, plant matter floating around in a, in a bunch of sand stuff.

Water flows right through it. Nutrients flow right through it. There's no life in it and it's, it, it, it's just a bad material for growing in. And that's what we see a lot in places where they've been continually using phosphorus and nitrogen synthetics for 60 years

[00:43:35] Michael Hawk: Now in the case for say an individual who is gardening, whether they're growing food or just growing, beautiful native plants or whatever the case might be. Do, are you selling to, to that type of consumer as well or is it mainly to commercial ag?

[00:43:54] Sam Baker: we do, we do sell to both. We actually got our start selling to, to master gardeners here in [00:44:00] Florida. We have a bunch of organizations called the Master Gardeners. We sold a lot to them. They had a lot of home gardens and community gardens. They did a lot of testing for us which eventually got us into our first major farms, but we still sell a lot to, to the home garden market.

So we have, I think, 40 something retail stores that are carrying this product. Mostly independent garden centers. But we, we also sell on Amazon. We sell through our website wrigglebrew.com. And that's a, that's a great source to get it if you're interested in growing it. But 90, 90% of our business is to the large farms because that's where we make the biggest difference in fertilizer runoff.

That's where most of the soil destruction is happening. So that's where we wanna be.

[00:44:42] Michael Hawk: It definitely makes sense. , Do you have any other tips or suggestions for individuals in their yards as to how to maintain healthy soil? So using your product, avoiding synthetic fertilizers. It seems like we've made that clear. Any other ideas?

[00:44:56] Sam Baker: Oh yeah, definitely doing your own composting or even your own worm farming, [00:45:00] it's actually not that hard to, to raise your own worms and make your own worm castings and even your own worm tea. You can, you can have worms in your backyard depending on where you live.

Obviously, if you're in like Arizona, that's gonna be hard. But if you're, if you're in Florida, if you're in California, it's not that difficult. Worm farming is, is not super challenging. A lot of people don't realize that earthworms are organisms that don't like to be under direct sunlight. So if you are raising earthworms, try and keep them shaded.

That's the biggest mistake I see people make other than feeding them acidic things don't do that either. If you are growing a garden, also look at using. Organisms or, or rather plants that have a symbiosis with one another. So in in nature, we hardly ever find monoculture crops, right? We don't find like one big patch of, of one thing growing.

We tend to find lots of plants growing nearby each other. Legumes. Famously, bean plants are much better at fixing nitrogen, pulling nitrogen in than most other plants are. So having [00:46:00] beans growing next to a tomato plant is a good idea because it's gonna bring nitrogen in, in excess that the tomato plant can make use of, which means you don't have to buy that nitrogen.

It also means the, the tomato plant is likely gonna be quite a lot healthier. Some plants are better at, at producing defensive compounds. So caffeine producing plants are good. If you're in Florida, we have the LP and Holly, it's a natural producer of caffeine wards off a lot of pests and insects.

That's a lot less pesticide you have to use. So there are all these tactics we can, we can use just by looking at how things are done in nature. And that's really the, the kind of the core of this whole idea. Whether we're talking about Wriggle Brew itself, which is a worm casting tea, fertilizer, or we're talking about methods for agriculture.

at the end of the day, it's all about taking what works in nature and, and retrofitting that for our purposes rather than trying to plow our own hardheaded way through how plants work.

[00:46:52] Michael Hawk: nature is, is sort of like, in a way this multimillion year experiment happening in millions and millions of, of [00:47:00] micro locations and what has worked is a good indicator of, of what will work.

[00:47:06] Sam Baker: There's, it's a, it is a pretty good sign if you, you go outside a lot and you see like some plant growing out of like a crack in the concrete or whatever, and it's doing way better than the plants are in your garden. You're like, how is that, how does that work? Well, there is something that that plant has figured out, whether it's the use of bacteria or the way the water's flowing in that one specific spot or, or something that has allowed it to survive and thrive.

And, sometimes it's, better for us to sit and watch and learn from that rather than say, okay, I'm gonna find every chemical on the planet and dump them on my plant, and it's gonna grow so big and huge.

There was a, a famous quote from Lao Tzu that said nature does not hurry yet.

Everything is accomplished. Yeah,

[00:47:46] Michael Hawk: I've heard that and I like that one. That's, that's a good one. So Sam, one of the other really intriguing things that you're doing with earthworms relates to decomposing plastic or breaking down plastic. Can you tell me a little bit about what you're [00:48:00] doing and where you're at with that?

[00:48:02] Sam Baker: about? Sure. So this, this is, in my opinion, one of the coolest things we're doing with worms, and we can talk about this. In greater depth another time. But the, the bottom line is we are using earthworms to eat a lot of plastic materials, essentially to decompose them and break them down back into soil again.

And that's, that's really groundbreaking for several reasons. But the big one is that there aren't a lot of ways right now to safely turn plastics into non plastics. And this is one of the only methods so far that, that we've observed that really works for this. And it all comes down to the fact that worms not, not typically earthworms, but more often larval worms produce enzymes for the purposes of digesting lots of materials.

And one of those enzymes happens to also be really useful for breaking down some of the polymers that plastics are made out of. And so there have actually, and there are pictures of this, so it's pretty cool to see they're actually like [00:49:00] mealworms and black soldierly larva and other worms that when left in chambers with just polystyrene.

Which is a plastic, they will eat that as a food source and they'll digest it and they will actually gain weight while eating that.

Which, which is really kind of amazing. 'cause plastics for 99% of organisms are benign slash poisonous. They are, you, you can't digest them. Like if you try to eat a bunch of polystyrene at best a bunch of polystyrene is going to come out of you.

And at worst you're gonna need to go to the hospital. Because we don't have the capacity to digest it. Most animals don't. It's, these are very strong polymers. And when we do end up getting these in our bodies, they are often coming in the form of microplastics. Microplastics are now being linked to all these different diseases, and I think there's something like a credit card's worth of plastic microplastic now in our brains on average.

So we don't even know all the medical impacts of these things yet. And they're also linked to cancers and behavioral problems. [00:50:00] And yet, as toxic as they are, nature has found. Some ways to start using them as a food source.

[00:50:07] Michael Hawk: So these larvae, these like the black soldier flies and, and so forth. They are not just

[00:50:12] Sam Baker: just

[00:50:13] Michael Hawk: making the plastic smaller, they're actually chemically changing them to a non-plastic form.

[00:50:20] Sam Baker: That's right. And that's, that's the critical thing. 'cause if it's just being blended up in their mouth or their gut, like that's, that's not really all that notable, like toddlers do that a lot unfortunately, but, but these worms, they do actually have an enzyme that allows them to break this plastic apart at a molecular level and use it as a food source.

And what's enabling them to do that are certain bacteria that live in their gut that we do find in earthworms and we find in lots of other organisms. It's just that only these larva seem to tend to have these bacteria in a large enough concentration and critically that these larva have mandibles that allow them to chew, that actually give them.

All the pieces they need to eat these soft [00:51:00] plastics as a food source. So what we've been working on is how do we take this ability of them eating plastic and how do we scale that up? How do we extrapolate that so that we can take plastic waste in bulk and eliminate it? And rather than relying on the larvae to to eat the plastic, what we've found is we can basically simulate a worm's gut by building what's called a bioreactor.

A big chamber that has all the bacteria from their, from their gut that they used to eat plastic, and it has all the kind of conditions you'd expect in their gut. And when you simulate this big worm gut and feed plastic into it, you can very finely control the conditions and you can get the digestion to happen exponentially faster than it would when it's just carried out by worms and what comes out the other end of it is basically like microbial poop, which.

Kind of like the algal mats we're talking about at the beginning is biomass, which we can compost and we [00:52:00] can also feed to earthworms, and the earthworms will eat it and produce worm castings, which as we know are an amazing material for making organic fertilizer.

[00:52:09] Michael Hawk: So you have like your own sort of cyclical economy there.

[00:52:14] Sam Baker: Yes. So you can, you can take plastic and then a couple weeks later you can now have soil, basically topsoil, humic, compost, worm casting material, which you can then grow plants and other things with, which then oftentimes end up getting packaged in plastic, and then the waste from that plastic goes back into our process to make more

[00:52:34] Michael Hawk: Well, I would prefer that, that we break the plastic chain at some point, but yeah, for, for all the plastic we have already, I think that would keep you busy for quite a while.

[00:52:43] Sam Baker: Oh yeah. Well that's, that's the thing. You have to do both. So we need to stop making plastic like now. The sooner the better. But that's really hard. And I can't do anything about that on my end. But what I can do is I can say, okay, well all the plastic you are generating, let me start to try and interdict it before it ends up in our [00:53:00] bodies or it ends up in our waterways and destroy it.

I'm not my end, I won't be able to solve the plastic being generated, but I can at least slow down the quantity that's ending up in the environment. It's like recycling in the sense that it's, it's kind of a, a slowing effect. It's better than recycling in that it is actually eliminating the plastic.

So it's like carbon offsetting versus carbon sequestration to, to analogize it to the climate world.

[00:53:26] Michael Hawk: Yeah. Yeah. And it, and it sounds like I, I know we're a little bit short on time, so this probably needs to be a quick answer, but again, reading between the lines, these enzymes that are able to break down these plastics, it's, it's not all plastics. I'm assuming it's, it's probably just a a subset of plastics, or have you found it to be pretty broadly applicable?

[00:53:45] Sam Baker: Well, so far we've been able to get it to work really conclusively on LDPE, which is plastic bags, PET, which is most plastic bottles and polyethylene. So it's like plastic films and EPS, which is, which is styrofoam. So right now it's like [00:54:00] 60% of plastics. So it's slightly over a majority of plastics, maybe 80% if you really, in certain, certain contexts.

We can do those. We can't do all of them. We can't do HT PE yet We cannot do PVC, but we could do a lot of them. 

[00:54:14] Michael Hawk: that's much more optimistic than I was expecting, so that's exciting to hear. It'll be interesting to follow along as as you progress down this pathway. And like we were talking on an aside a, a bit ago I'd love to catch back up with you some number of months down the road.

You tell me when a good time is and, and we can circle back on this topic.

[00:54:34] Sam Baker: Yeah, well that, and that's the great thing. So we're working on getting some new sources of funding. We've got a big one that's coming down the pipeline for us, hopefully. And we'll be setting up like a pilot plant to actually go from the lab bench where we're, destroying, like at, at this moment we're destroying like a handful of pounds of plastic maybe every week or so to being able to destroy maybe as much as a ton, one ton of plastic a week.

And that would be pretty amazing. And [00:55:00] from there, just, just scale it even more. But right now, this process is, is experimental, but the signs are all pointing towards it being something that once we get the right funding and the right support, we could deploy this en mass and really start to take care of a huge amount of plastics.

And, and all of that is, is something we can thank earthworms for at the end of the day.

[00:55:17] Michael Hawk: Yeah. Earthworms are here to save the world. It sounds like.

[00:55:21] Sam Baker: In inadvertently. I mean, It, it's true. We, we used to rely on them to make all of our soil. And if you don't have soil, you can't make food. And if you don't, can't make food, you can't eat. So in a way, they have been saving us for generations and we just never knew it. Now we're finally starting to understand them, which I think warrants a little bit of appreciation to them,

[00:55:40] Michael Hawk: So for people that want to follow along and, and maybe follow you , where can people go? I, I know you have a website. How about social media presence? Can you give some pointers for folks?

[00:55:51] Sam Baker: Absolutely. So we're, we're on Instagram, Wriggle Brew and Instagram. Wriggle Brew is on Facebook. Wriggle Brew is on TikTok. I don't do anything on TikTok [00:56:00] myself, but there are videos of me apparently there now. We are, of course we have a website that you can follow and I also have a YouTube channel.

So if you're interested in looking more into, into Wriggle Brew, the Science of It, there's a lot of videos I've done. Talking about that. And I also have a personal YouTube channel where I do a lot of pyrotechnic stuff. So don't look at that one.

[00:56:23] Michael Hawk: Oh, people will now

[00:56:24] Sam Baker: Yeah, they'll,

[00:56:24] Michael Hawk: it.

[00:56:26] Sam Baker: but yeah. Wriggle brew.com.

Look for Wriggle Brew, and if you wanna talk to me specifically you can also reach me at info info@rigglebrew.com. Those questions all go to me. I love talking about worms, if that hasn't come across. So send me a message and I'll, I'll chat with you about it.

[00:56:43] Michael Hawk: Well, I will link to all of those in the show notes and make sure it's easy for people to find you. So this has really been enlightening. I've enjoyed learning about your world and the worms world today at a level that I never knew existed. So thank you so much. I [00:57:00] appreciate you taking the time today and I appreciate you and your work.

[00:57:02] Sam Baker: work. You're quite welcome. Thanks for coming down the wormhole with me. It was a lot of fun.