SAVED FROM DESPAIR BY WORMS A Manistee mom turned a miniature effort to combat climate change into a thriving business.
By Patrick Sullivan A couple of years ago, with another child on the way, Elana Warsen said she had a sort of miniature existential crisis — she wanted to do something to make the world a better place, but she wasn’t sure what to do. Warsen, who lives with her husband and three children in Manistee, found the answer under her feet, in the ground. She decided to broaden her family’s composting regime by composting indoors with worms, a technique that can be used throughout the worst winters without having to go outside to turn a compost heap. Her foray into the world of worms has taken over a large chunk of Warsen’s life. She’s turned her passion for them into a business called Michigan Worm Works, and she wants to spread the word about how worms can turn food waste into a valuable commodity. Northern Express recently chatted with Warsen about her passion. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Northern Express: Tell me about how you got interested in worms. Elana Warsen: I got interested in worms because I have always been very concerned
about the environment. And then during a time in my life when I had really little kids, and I was pregnant with a new child, I just felt this overwhelming urge to do something, whatever I could do to make the world a safer place for my children. I felt I had little control over these big problems, and it was causing stress and anxiety, and I didn’t want to feel that way anymore. So, I channeled that energy into a project, and that project was going to be finding a way to continue composting our household food scraps during the winter. Express: That’s a really interesting way to put it. I think you take something like, say, the climate crisis, and as individuals, we feel helpless, like maybe it’s easier to give up because there’s nothing we can do on our own. But then, if you do find something meaningful that you can actually do, it makes a difference, doesn’t it? Warsen: Yeah. Yeah. And it wasn’t meaningful in the beginning. Right now, we’re a family of five, and, you know, even us diverting our food waste like that doesn’t change the world. But it really changed me to feeling like I have the agency to live my life with a purpose instead of a feeling of despair. Express: When you started this, did it
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seem like something that you thought might become a business? Or did that come later? Warsen: No, no, no. That definitely came later. It didn’t feel like something that was going to be a business. It felt like, ‘I’m really glad that my husband is humoring my pregnant self, keeping a bucket of worms in our basement.’ And, you know, it just felt like an experiment or something. Just something I wanted to do, I wanted to try. Express: How did it grow to become a business then? Warsen: Because I kept acquiring more and more worm stuff. I started with the one bucket, and then I built another bucket. I built some worm habitats out of buckets, and those were fine in the basement. And then I decided I wanted to upgrade to something bigger, larger-scale, more user-friendly. And my husband said, ‘OK, that’s fine’ — and he’s not my boss or anything, but, you know, if something’s going to become part of your shared living space, you want everyone on board. My husband said, ‘You know, Elana, if you want to take up all of our garage space and some of our living space, that would be OK — if you could make some money
doing it. If it’s not making us any money, then we have to keep it to a reasonable size.’ And that seemed fair. And so, I put an ad on Craigslist: ‘worm castings for sale.’ And, my husband and I were both pretty surprised. I got a lot of people interested in buying them. Express: Let’s back up a minute. Could you explain a little bit about what you are
