Loving God, raising worms

SPRING GROVE, Pa.—Drive through southern Pennsylvania reveals sprawling farmland that never seems to end: Rolling hills give way to breathtaking views of cornfields, orchards, and vineyards speckled with barns, silos, and farmhouses featuring carefully manicured lawns.

Take a turn down a private lane, and you’ll find tucked under a grove of trees a more unusual agriculture operation: Uncle Jim’s Worm Farm. On this 13-acre plot Jim and Patricia Shaw have raised eight children and millions of worms—all for the glory of God.

“I enjoy what I do, and I thank God,” said Shaw, a 6-foot-6, 268-pound former college football player, as we sat in his laboratory. “It’s not necessary to raise worms, but this is the avenue God has given me to do what I need to do.”

You might call Jim Shaw the Phil Robertson of vermiculture. Shaw doesn’t have a hit TV show, but he’s got a flowing beard, big family, and booming business to rival the Duck Dynasty patriarch, with the personality and Christian faith to match.

Shaw, 56, started selling worms on his father’s suggestion to make extra money in grade school more than four decades ago. He went on to graduate from Colgate University, where he played football, but he continued raising worms even after he married, became a father, and worked in the trucking industry.

The early years featured endless tinkering with the best recipes, feeding methods, and growing temperatures to promote worm health and reproduction. It was backbreaking work, especially since he started with only a pitchfork and a shovel: “To get a pound of worms you probably have to go through 200 pounds of soil. During those days it was just chronic shoveling, sifting, shoveling, and maneuvering.”

The business expanded with the advent of the internet, but it remained a part-time enterprise until 2008, when Shaw—who professed faith in Christ in 1987—says an extraordinary thing happened.

‘I almost fell over—it was like God’s word just came over me and said, “I’m going to take this silly business [of] raising worms, and I’m going to promote you.”’

One morning he woke up at 2 o’clock with an urge to read his Bible. He flipped to Psalm 75, which says not to self-promote, because promotion comes from God. For a few minutes Shaw resisted the urge to look up the word promotion, thinking he knew what it meant. When he finally dug out his Strong’s Concordance, he made a surprising discovery: The last definition of the Hebrew word translated promotion is “breed worms.”

“I almost fell over—it was like God’s word just came over me and said, ‘I’m going to take this silly business [of] raising worms, and I’m going to promote you,’” Shaw said. “When the Lord does a miracle and shows me things, I don’t just yawn and say, ‘Pass the pizza.’”

Uncle Jim’s Worm Farm has since become a vermiculture juggernaut—likely the largest such operation in the country. It includes two farms supporting the Shaws, several of their adult children (including 13 grandchildren), and a half-dozen part-time workers.

STEP INSIDE SHAW’S LAB, and you’ll find a detail-oriented operation clearly decades in the making. Hundreds of halved, open-faced 55-gallon drums line the walls from floor to ceiling. The contents look like dirt, but Shaw plunges his hands downward to reveal each one contains 20,000 to 30,000 worms.

The quiet, temperature-controlled building is well-lit. Two tiny strands of Christmas lights hang above each layer of blue drums—just enough to deter the worms (their thin membrane leaves them very sensitive to light). Shaw has generators to back up the power after past outages sent millions of European night crawlers and Eisenia fetida red worms slithering all over the place: “It’s a real nightmare.”

A large rat scampered along the wall as Shaw talked. “Ya know, I don’t like those rats,” he said, calling it a “constant tug of war” to keep them from eating his worms. “Sometimes they look like they’re the size of raccoons.”

Shaw hoisted a drum over his shoulder, carried it to an empty wheelbarrow, and plopped it down near a long, round tumbler. He flipped a switch and the tumbler—an apparatus 16 feet long and 3 feet in diameter—hummed to life while he began dumping in large scoops from the barrel.

The tumbler acts as a sifter: As it spins, gaps in the screening grow progressively larger along the length of the tumbler, so the soil first trickles below to plastic containers, eggs and baby worms trickle into subsequent containers, and the adult wigglers gather into a mound of spaghetti at the end. Within six minutes, the process separates from the worms some 90 percent of the soil—nutrient-rich material that organic gardeners prize and Shaw sells separately: “I call it black gold. The educated type call it worm castings.”

Shaw scrapes away the remaining soil to create bags of pure, bug-free worms (manure is not involved). His shipping methods—which help ensure his worms arrive alive—are one of several trade secrets he cites as competitive advantages. His competitors know it: They’ve tried to sneak onto Shaw’s property to record his methods, and one hacked his website.

Worms can live several years, but Shaw generally maintains a two- to three-month turnover rate. He mostly caters to gardeners and likens pricing to the stock market: lower when supply is up, and higher when supply is down.

Shaw says he’s reaped significant financial benefit from the business only in the last few years, and he’s used the increase to spread the gospel. He records the sermons he preaches at the house church in which his family participates, and pays some $100,000 per year to air them five days per week on 20 area radio stations—all of it paid for with worm proceeds.

“My friends can’t believe it,” Patricia said as we stood in the kitchen of the Shaws’ 18th-century farmhouse.

The business has produced more than financial rewards. Patricia said it has built camaraderie within the family, and the property is always bustling with activity. The Shaws homeschooled their three sons (the girls homeschooled and later went to public school), an arrangement that gave them more time to work on the farm.

The boys lifted, hauled, and dug their way to becoming football linemen: All grew nearly as tall as their father and featured playing weights around 300 pounds. The oldest two, Jimmy and John, started for the Penn State Nittany Lions, and 21-year-old David currently plays for the Maryland Terrapins.

Shaw thoroughly enjoys the many benefits of his low-stress job. He’s stayed in touch with many of his college friends, who are now in banking and other white-collar jobs: “They’re actually jealous of me. … They see me laughing and smiling, and I see them losing their hair.”

He said the key is working for a higher purpose: “I don’t care whether you’re a dry-waller, a garbage-picker, [or] a greeter at Walmart—I don’t care who you are—you do it for the glory of God. He is no respecter of people.”