Worms convert muck to brass for small firm

By ELLEN READ

A small Bay of Plenty business is thriving on just 1 per cent market share in its industry.

Power Organics Bay of Plenty produces biologically active vermicast (worm castings) fertilisers under the REVITAL brand.

The New Zealand fertiliser business is dominated by well-known brands Ravensdown and Ballance Agrinutrients, which have around 90 per cent of the market.

So how does this tiny company - with only 10 staff - compete? By educating potential customers and capitalising on REVITAL's point of difference, the fact that it's a sustainable, living product that can be tailored to individual customer needs.

"We offer people something that's new and different and that takes them a bit longer to warm to, but once they do they see there are some good alternatives out there," says Power Organics' general manager (BOP), Peter O'Neill.

At the company's site just outside Tauranga, 60 tonnes of worms - 240 million of them - are busily eating in the name of work.

They are housed in 24 windrows, each 150m long by 3.2m wide and covered to keep the light-hating worms happy. The worms are fed once a week, on pre-composted green waste, paper pulp, kiwifruit waste and paunch grass (chewed grass taken from cows' stomachs at the freezing works).

Every four to five months, the vermicast is harvested and blended with trace elements to produce the REVITAL range, solid and liquid.

The Power Organics concept was established six years ago by a group of investors, with the first site opened in New Plymouth. The Bay of Plenty site opened a year ago and the REVITAL range is also available nationally through sites in Geraldine and Feilding.

The REVITAL sites were bought late last year by Hamilton-based Perry Waste Services, which believes it can capitalise on the company's clean, green image.

"It suits their direction, moving from landfilling, which is unsustainable, to being a processor of waste products," says Mr O'Neill.

Power Organics is an advocate for Warehouse founder Stephen Tindall's zero waste programme and this helps promote its environmental potential to customers.

Perry Waste Services boss Peter Higgs says REVITAL fits his company's strategy of turning waste into a resource.

He says the product side of the company will be unchanged but the sales and marketing aspects will benefit from being associated with the larger firm.

"We'll add a bit more grunt to it," he said.

And the future? Cowshed waste could become an unexpected bonus for dairy farmers if present research is successful.

Power Organics is looking for ways to enlist the earthworm into creating an environmentally acceptable management tool for dairy farmers to use on the farm.

The company has just begun a research programme, helped by a $69,000 grant through the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology's Grants for Private Sector Research and Development (GPSRD) scheme.

The company is looking at a system that will separate the solids from liquids in cowshed waste.

It is also working on a design for an on-farm vermiculture system that will turn the solid waste into fertiliser, leaving a cleaner liquid waste for discharge or land application.