Produce Peddlers
Launched in June 2019, Produce Peddlers works like this: Local farmers with extra produce or producers looking to sell their wares can post a picture of what they’re selling to the marketplace with a ...
Vermicomposting with BFLO Worm Works
Turning food waste into opportunity
Walking around BFLO Worm Works, I get the feeling that Myles Stubblefield has built his childhood paradise—the dream world of an endlessly curious kid who loved nature and animals. Stubblefield’s bull terrier Doc immediately greets me. Salvaged houseplants thrive under grow lamps. Roseanne, a Vietnamese potbellied pig, contentedly grunts from her area in the corner. And of course, there are the worms—thousands of worms, in dozens of buckets of compost at varying points of decomposition.
The soundtrack to Stubblefield’s paradise is Buffalo’s 96.1 The Breeze “feel-good variety while you work.” As the opening notes of Des’ree’s “You Gotta Be” pump through the space, Stubblefield says, donning his huge smile, “This is one of the songs that changed my life.”
“I’ve listened to negative stuff my whole life, and it gets in your head. So, I stopped listening to that and everything I do now is to quiet that persistent voice in the back of my head—the judgmental nature and that voice telling me I can’t do it.”
This positivity is integral to Stubblefield’s approach to life and work, which revolves around demonstrating kindness to the Earth. “When you cease all thoughts and intentions of harm to others, then every form of nature will indemnify you of any harm,” says Stubblefield, paraphrasing the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, one of his many inspirations.
BFLO Worm Works came out of an idea that most people had dismissed as impossible: composting dog poop. A longtime dog trainer and owner of K-9 Vision, Inc., Stubblefield looked at the poop he was piling up each week and asked how he could keep it out of the waste stream. This led him to learn about vermicomposting, which immediately appealed to his science nerdiness, commitment to environmental stewardship, and entrepreneurial nature. While he has yet to professionally sell dog poop compost—he’s still doing testing with hopes of patenting his method soon—Stubblefield’s passion for vermiculture took off, inspiring him to found BFLO Worm Works in 2019.
BFLO Worm Works has contracts with local businesses to transform their food waste into soil, including restaurants and Delaware North, the hospitality management and food service company for Highmark Stadium. According to the EPA in 2018, of the estimated 133 million of pounds of food waste produced annually, only 4.1 percent is actually composted, making it the fourth-largest contributor to municipal solid waste.
First, Stubblefield partners with local composting business Farmer Pirates to collect food scraps for pre-composting, a necessary step before Stubblefield can use vermicompost and create worm castings. When creating both regular compost and worm castings, you’re turning food scraps and other cast-aside material into a valuable soil enricher; worm castings, however, are like a concentrate. “You get tons more microbial life in much less volume,” says Stubblefield.
Farmer Pirates has the space to “hot compost” the material, transforming the food scraps into a very dank mulch. “My friends in the composting industry get it up to a certain parameter—temperature, moisture, pH and conditions that will kill off certain microbes and favor other microbes that we want: bacteria, fungi, nematodes, stuff like that.” Farmer Pirates usually continues composting the material, turning it into a compost that they sell for use across the city. For BFLO Worm Works, however, they give this “half-done” compost back, and Stubblefield’s worms take over.
Roseanne the pig also acts as a pre-composter, eating cheese, meat, melon rinds and other slower-to-compost materials, and pooping it out in a state that is more favorable to the worms.
Stubblefield then takes this pre-composted material, or “worm bedding,” and continues to compost it in three scales of bins. The material starts off in what he calls shelf bins. These function as breeder bins, giving the younger worms an opportunity to grow and populate. “See how this still has some food scraps in it?” he asks, cupping a handful of soil. “It’s also really high in microbial life, making it the perfect feedstock for my worm farm.”
The next level is floor bins: bigger bins where the worms continue to break down the material. From there, Stubblefield moves the compost to commercial bins: even larger containers in which bigger and older worms continue to eat the matter and poop it out as worm castings. The final step in the process is to safely separate the worms from their castings, which Stubblefield does by passing the material through a sifter. The resulting product is a fine but rich soil, sold in 2-, 20- and 40-pound bags as “Super Soil.” This worm poo or worm casting manure, known as vermicast, is a concentrated organic fertilizer that can improve soil aeration and drainage, while also bolstering water retention. It can enrich the environment of potted houseplants, greenhouses, gardens and yards alike.
From when Stubblefield receives the pre-composted material, the whole process takes three to five weeks—not to mention hundreds of thousands of worms.
Stubblefield works with Gardeness owner Eme Nieves, a fellow self-proclaimed soil nerd, to interpret the soil testing results they get from Earthfort Labs. “We’re purposely keeping in a higher carbon and fungal content to create a fungally dominated casting compost,” explains Stubblefield. “This is way beyond industry standard—most compost is bacterially dominated—and it’s not something you’re going to get at a big box store, online or usually even from a compost site.”
In addition to Stubblefield’s ingenuity and hard work, the business has benefited from recent legislation. Effective Jan. 1, 2022, the NYS Food Donation and Food Scraps Recycling law requires “businesses and institutions that generate an annual average of two tons of wasted food per week to either donate excess edible food or recycle all remaining food scraps.”
Furthermore, New York’s recent focus on Minority & Women-Owned Businesses (MWBE) has driven customers to BFLO Worm Works. “NY State put teeth on it and said to big companies: ‘We want to see X number of MWBEs on your vendor list or you’re going to stop getting in-state contracts and federal money.’ So, without any advertisements or Google ads, big companies are knocking on my door for me to take their food waste. And once I’ve got them, I have an opportunity to get them into what I’m trying to do.”
Leaders at some local businesses, such as Chef Kevin Sampson at Elmwood Village’s Jack Rabbit, were eager to partner with BFLO Worm Works from the get-go. “As a scratch kitchen, we try to use as much as we can but we still make a lot of food waste,” says Sampson. For instance, they caramelize their own onions, going through as much as 150 pounds a week, which would normally send bags of onion skins to the dumpster. Instead, the kitchen saves their food scraps—about 60 pounds weekly—for Stubblefield to pick up. And occasionally, they get a gift of Super Soil, made from their food scraps, which they put into the potted plants around the restaurant.
“Every little bit helps and it really doesn’t take much to save up the stuff that you would normally throw away, that can be turned into better things,” says Sampson.
In addition to working with clients—both the businesses who pay him to take their food scraps and those who buy the end product—Stubblefield does speaking engagements and workshops on composting, most recently in 24 Buffalo Public Schools through a contract with the education initiative Say Yes Buffalo. At each of these opportunities, Stubblefield aims to inspire others towards environmentalism, while also bringing authenticity. “I think I owe it to the people who do look up to me to actually tell the real story—that it’s not always easy, it doesn’t look great behind the scenes. But, follow your passion. And somewhere along that journey, you’ll be introduced to your purpose.”
Grace Cejka, a senior environmental studies major at Canisius College, was so drawn to Stubblefield’s mission and work that she sought him out for an internship. “Myles is down-to-earth and easy to connect with. And I love that he’s always looking for more ways to be sustainable,” she says.
Stubblefield is ever striving for closed-loop sustainability, looking to reuse materials and create no waste, to a compulsive degree. “I heard someone say recently that the mission of sustainability is one of the most daunting tasks; from my lifetime through my grandchildren’s, we’re just going to be turning the Titanic,” Stubblefield says, looking not discouraged but invigorated.
“But—and here go my goosebumps—I know that until the day I die, this is what I want to dedicate myself to. And that I’m going to create something so that in 80 years, some little Black kid who can’t stop talking in class is going to say, ‘This dude did this and this but what he didn’t see was this!’ And he’s going to take this thing to a whole other level,” says Stubblefield, looking out, far beyond the worm bins and the dogs, to a future that he is bringing about.
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