After Brent graduated from college, he took on more responsibility around the family farm. Brent said his two uncles and his father, Loren Broberg, really helped him get started in agriculture. They continue to help each other with the row crop aspect.
It takes a lot of faith to be a farmer. It takes even more hope and trust to convert a fully functioning hog barn into a worm farm.
Brent and Marykae Broberg took that leap of faith in 2014 when they established Broberg Organics LLC. A USDA-certified organic worm casting production company, Broberg Organics is located on the couple’s farm just a few miles north of Tilden, Nebraska.
“When we decided to do this, it was a lot of prayer. I basically dismantled a 500-head finisher that had been working fine into a worm barn,” Brent said.
The entire process has been trial and error. From a single pail of worms to producing 18 tons of worm castings per month, their business and understanding of vermiculture has evolved over the past nine years.
Brent grew up in agriculture, showing Charolais cattle in 4-H at the Antelope County Fair and helping on his family’s diverse farm. Marykae moved frequently in her youth as a minister’s daughter. They met at Concordia University in Seward, Nebraska, where he was part of the basketball team and she played collegiate volleyball.
Brent and Loren own the Broberg Charolais cattle herd together. Their annual purebred Charolais bull production sale is held each February.
Loren farrows 500 sows, and Brent feeds them out; the pigs are sold as 100-pound roasters to California.
“It’s a good idea to be well-rounded,” Brent said of their operation with hogs, cattle and row crops.
Adding a worm farm into the mix has been Brent and Marykae’s project. The idea formed when Marykae’s mother gave Brent an article about raising worms. Brent was already contemplating the hog market and the fate of the old hog buildings. Maybe the buildings could be used to raise worms for bait, he thought.
He searched the internet and found a place that sold worm farms, but you had to order their DVD first. Eventually, Marykae ordered it for him, “probably so I would stop talking about it,” Brent joked.
“After watching the DVD, I realized it wasn’t the bait end of the industry but the worm castings that were important,” said Brent. He began doing research about worm castings and discovered how beneficial they are to a healthy soil profile.
Marykae referred to worm castings as a “soil builder.” The microbes in the castings unlock nutrients in the soil to become available to the plants. The effects can reduce soil compaction and improve moisture retention.
Completely organic, worm castings naturally support the ecosystem within the soil instead of breaking it down as do chemical fertilizers.
“When you get the right bugs doing the job God intended them to do, everything just works,” said Brent.
The timing was right for the Brobergs to enter the vermiculture business, said Brent. The green movement in agriculture was gaining momentum, and soil health was becoming more prevalent.
Not knowing where it would lead, Brent spent the summer of 2013 gutting an old farrowing barn at his parents’ farm south of Tilden to prepare for the first worm delivery. The worm farm arrived in 28 2½ gallon pails, each containing 275 African night crawlers. A feed recipe and instructions for how to propagate the worms was included.
To keep their worm population going, the Brobergs collect worm eggs from the castings to hatch. African night crawlers typically live about 40-50 weeks, although egg production wanes over time, said Brent. They can live as long as 100 weeks.
Finding the perfect environment for the worms proved challenging. The feed recipe called for peat moss, but compost could be used. Since peat moss was not closely available, Brent chose the latter. This proved too hot for the worms. He saved one bucket by going out to a cornfield and getting “Antelope County clay.”
Their faith flickered.
“Here I had remodeled a farrowing house and had one bucket of worms. We wondered, ‘what are we doing?’” Brent said.
They found a source for peat moss from a bog in north central Iowa, which they still use as their bedding source. The Brobergs also learned the importance of bedding temperature and moisture. African night crawlers perform best in warm conditions of 70 degrees. At 90 degrees, they will stop eating and come to the surface of the boxes. At 60 degrees or less, they die. Bedding too wet or too dry will also kill the worms.
“We are very conscious of making sure the bedding is just right, because you won’t know there’s an issue until the next time you dump the worm castings. By then, it’s too late,” Marykae said.
The peat moss is mixed with a special grain-based diet and run through a machine to pulverize the larger chunks. Nutrition Services of York, Nebraska, grinds the non-GMO, organic feed.
Providing the same feed ration results in a consistent, high quality casting product. Moreover, feeding table scraps or garbage can inadvertently spread salmonella through worm castings.
“In our industry, we have to be careful about the castings we sell,” Brent said.
Red wigglers are the most commonly used worms for the home gardener or in small-scale vermiculture. “They’re like goats—they’re the best garbage-eating worm,” said Brent. Castings from red wigglers have a moist consistency.
The worm castings produced at Broberg Organics are more like coffee grounds. Brent explained that they specifically chose African night crawlers because their eating pattern infiltrates the entire bedding, whereas Canadian night crawlers eat from the top down.
At first, the worms were kept in the buckets, where they would convert the bedding into worm casting over a period of 14 days. The Brobergs would then manually dump the buckets into a shifter and fill 30-pounds sacks of worm castings by hand.
“When we first started, it was a lot of manual labor and heavy lifting,” Marykae said.
As business grew, they found that bulk amounts were easier to market and handle. Within a year, they decided to scale up production to meet the high demand. However, they needed a bigger building. The perfect location was found right in their backyard—the 500-head finisher building. The only problem was that it was still being used to feed out market hogs.
Taking another leap of faith, the Brobergs found a different location for feeding hogs and again set to remodeling a hog barn. Over the winter, they filled the pits with sand and sectioned off a smaller room for the worms. They had to wait until the warmer weather of spring 2015 to transfer the worm farm into its current location.
The worms were also transferred from the small pails into plastic tubs about five times larger. They purchased a bigger worm shifter—the MK 11 model—to more efficiently sort worm castings from the eggs and adult worms.
Still needing more space, the Brobergs added on to the existing 125-foot-long building to encompass the feed mixer, pulverizer, worm shifter and additional storage.
By installing a large overhead door, they also reduced some of the manual labor involved. Instead of shoveling peat moss from a loader bucket through a walk-in door, the peat moss is now delivered in 50-yard truckloads and dumped straight onto a heated concrete pad. This heated floor was necessary because, previously, they had to constantly stir the pile and hang heat lamps in the colder months to prepare the bedding for new hatches of night crawlers.
“Peat moss in January comes frozen,” said Brent. “It takes time to thaw and warm it to 60-70 degrees, and we need to stay ahead so we don’t run out of peat moss.”
But heating the new location with the propane heater still in the building from the hogs proved to be a hard lesson for the Brobergs. “We lost just about all our worms because we didn’t have the right ventilation in the winter with the propane heater,” Brent said. They have since installed an electric heater in the worm room and added a fan system to provide cross-ventilation.
With ample room to increase production, the Brobergs faced the next dilemma of finding equipment at an affordable price. In an answer to their prayers, they met Randy Kluth of Wisconsin, who was looking to retire from vermiculture.
“The Lord brought him into our life at the right time because we were ready to go big and he was ready to retire. He gave us a great deal on everything,” Brent said.
Kluth passed away of a heart attack a month after selling his equipment. Brent expressed gratitude for the man’s generosity in helping them grow their business.
Fully equipped for expansion, the Brobergs continued to fine-tune production. They bought a forklift to easily carry and lift the large boxes they had acquired from Kluth. Measuring 2 ½ feet wide by 4 feet long and 1 feet deep, these boxes hold approximately 6,600 night crawlers.
They also upgraded from shifters to a trommel. The long, round tunnel has two screen sizes to separate the castings, eggs and worms. Castings fall out of the quarter-inch openings, eggs filter through the half-inch screen and the mature worms are collected from the opening at the end. Brian Carney, who has a large-scale vermiculture operation in Wisconsin and has become a close friend of the Brobergs, custom-built the trommel. Brent said that it’s hard to find replacement parts for the machine.
“John Deere doesn’t have trommel repair parts,” Brent chuckled.
At their peak production in the summer of 2021, the Brobergs had a little over half a million worms—6,600 worms in 100 boxes—pumping out 18 tons of worm castings per month.
Broberg Organics products are used widely by organic farmers and the hemp industry. The castings are sold in one-ton super sacs.
Brent said they have shipped truckloads of worm castings to soil blenders in Oklahoma and Kansas, as well as locally. On a commercial scale, the castings can be applied to fields in a variety of ways. Brent shared how a customer in Hartington, Nebraska, mixes the worm castings with chicken litter and spreads it as a dry fertilizer. Another organic farmer from Spalding, Nebraska, liquefies the castings with fish emulsion and sprays it on the field or runs it through the pivot as a foliar feed.
Their biggest client is Soil Works in Yankton, South Dakota. Broberg’s worm castings are one of the ingredients in the company’s biological inoculant, Bio-5. They load a semi with 22-24 tons of worm castings each time.
As the economy has slowed, so has the demand for worm castings. The Brobergs have reduced production for the time being but have surplus for anyone interested in adding worm castings to their farming operation, home garden, landscape or even indoor plants.
Winter is a hard time in the worm casting business. The market is done until the next growing season, and the worms slow down production.
“You can’t fool a worm,” Brent said. “Even though they’re inside, the worms know it’s wintertime.”
Not being so occupied in the worm barn means that Brent and Marykae can fulfill their most important role as parents. The couple gets plenty of bleacher time cheering on Elkhorn Valley with all three of their daughters playing basketball. Oldest daughter Karlee is a junior, Miley is in the seventh grade and Sadie is a fifth grader.
Brent and Marykae also get their time on the court. He coaches youth basketball now, but before starting the worm farm he was the varsity basketball coach at Elkhorn Valley for 12 years. Marykae coaches youth volleyball. In addition to keeping the farm records and finances, she also runs a photography business and is on the school board.
The Broberg family is active as members of Immanuel Lutheran Church in Tilden, where Marykae is the Sunday school superintendent and pianist. Brent serves on the board of trustees.
Brent said the church is a big part of their life. Without their faith, the Brobergs never would have had the courage to turn a hog building into a worm farm, or meet such helpful people and good customers along the journey.
“Our priority in everything we do is our faith. That’s where it all starts,” said Brent.
To learn more about Broberg Organics visit www.brobergorganics.com [brobergorganics.com].
Source: Kristen Sindelar, Midwest Messenger