{"id":3674,"date":"2010-04-25T13:40:08","date_gmt":"2010-04-25T13:40:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zmetro.com\/?p=3674"},"modified":"2010-04-25T13:40:08","modified_gmt":"2010-04-25T13:40:08","slug":"a_worm_farm_rew","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=3674","title":{"rendered":"A worm farm rewrites the start-up rules"},"content":{"rendered":"

Henry Hamman<\/a>: <\/p>\n

The drive up to Coalmont, Grundy County, Tennessee, winds through beautiful countryside \u2013 hardwood forests, open meadows, meandering creeks. The land also bears the scars of decades of poverty \u2013 collapsed chicken houses, signs advertising \u201cwood for sale\u201d, a faded placard taped to a mailbox printed with the words \u201cIndoor yard sale\u201d. The roadsides are littered with posters for forthcoming local elections; around here, a $50,000 salary as county clerk makes a person part of the economic elite.
\n


\nThis is hardly Silicon Valley or Wall Street, but I am in Coalmont to interview a captain of industry, one of the county\u2019s biggest employers, someone you might even call a visionary \u2013 the owner of what must be the world\u2019s only vertically integrated worm factory. Silver Bait LLC produces fishing worms by the millions. But that\u2019s only the beginning of what it produces. The walls of the 170,000sq ft worm factory are made of giant concrete blocks that the company produces onsite. Likewise, the pre-stressed concrete columns and beams in the building. Silver Bait also produces its own corrugated metal roofing on a machine the company\u2019s founder, Bruno Durant, designed and built.
\n


\nFrench-born, 50-year-old Durant grows 300 acres of corn here, to feed his worms, and he harvests it with second-hand machinery he renovated in his onsite equipment- maintenance building. He invented his own machinery to harvest the worms and he is about to complete work on a device that will mechanise most of the rest of the worm-\u00adculture process.


\nHe\u2019s also about to put in place a full-scale packing line (designed by himself and built in his onsite machine shop). The worms are dispatched for sale in small plastic containers made in his onsite injection-moulding machine and are delivered to his customers \u2013 bait wholesalers across the eastern US \u2013 in his company\u2019s refrigerated trucks. He does purchase peat from Canada as the growing medium for his worms. But that\u2019s about all he buys in.
\n<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Henry Hamman<\/a>: <\/p>\n

The drive up to Coalmont, Grundy County, Tennessee, winds through beautiful countryside \u2013 hardwood forests, open meadows, meandering creeks. The land also bears the scars of decades of poverty \u2013 collapsed chicken houses, signs advertising \u201cwood for sale\u201d, a faded placard taped to a mailbox printed with the words \u201cIndoor yard sale\u201d. The roadsides are littered with posters for forthcoming local elections; around here, a $50,000 salary as county clerk makes a person part of the economic elite.
\n


\nThis is hardly Silicon Valley or Wall Street, but I am in Coalmont to interview a captain of industry, one of the county\u2019s biggest employers, someone you might even call a visionary \u2013 the owner of what must be the world\u2019s only vertically integrated worm factory. Silver Bait LLC produces fishing worms by the millions. But that\u2019s only the beginning of what it produces. The walls of the 170,000sq ft worm factory are made of giant concrete blocks that the company produces onsite. Likewise, the pre-stressed concrete columns and beams in the building. Silver Bait also produces its own corrugated metal roofing on a machine the company\u2019s founder, Bruno Durant, designed and built.
\n


\nFrench-born, 50-year-old Durant grows 300 acres of corn here, to feed his worms, and he harvests it with second-hand machinery he renovated in his onsite equipment- maintenance building. He invented his own machinery to harvest the worms and he is about to complete work on a device that will mechanise most of the rest of the worm-\u00adculture process.


\nHe\u2019s also about to put in place a full-scale packing line (designed by himself and built in his onsite machine shop). The worms are dispatched for sale in small plastic containers made in his onsite injection-moulding machine and are delivered to his customers \u2013 bait wholesalers across the eastern US \u2013 in his company\u2019s refrigerated trucks. He does purchase peat from Canada as the growing medium for his worms. But that\u2019s about all he buys in.
\n<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,3,32,35],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3674"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3674"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3674\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}