Leroy ? Don Donelson is a wrangler, of sorts.

Each day, like any good wrangler, he checks his livestock to make certain they have enough feed, water and air.

It’s a big herd, more than half a million strong. Well, it’s not exactly a herd. It’s a wiggle. That’s right, a wiggle.

You see, Don Donelson is a worm farmer. He raises worms in a 30-by-40 foot metal building behind his home in LeRoy. And a herd of worms is called a wiggle.

Donelson and his partners, Jim Fry, of LeRoy, and Steve Miller, of Kansas City, Mo., became worm farmers in 2001.

“We started thinking about raising escargot,” Donelson said. “That’s snails. But after doing some research, we decided there just wasn’t much of a market.”

The partners drove to Wisconsin one weekend to visit worm industry giant Unco Industries and, on the way home, decided to take the bait, so to speak, and raise a wiggle of worms in LeRoy. They call their business Midwest Organic Enterprises and their mascot is a sassy little worm, wearing a cowboy hat, whose nickname is, what else, Moe.

“We started out raising cultured nightcrawlers,” Donelson said. “But since then, we’ve gotten into tiger worms and European nightcrawlers, too.”

Donelson is a big fan of the lowly worm. “Just like us, worms need three things to live,” he said, “food, water and air. They have nine hearts and a gizzard, which they use to grind up their food. And they can eat their weight in garbage every day.” Worms are 93 percent water, but the solid part of the worm is protein.

Worms are hermaphrodites, each having male and female sexual organs.

“You know that pocket they have around the middle of them?” Donelson asked. “Well, when they couple, one will crawl inside another one’s pocket and that’s how they couple. Then each of them will have babies.”

Jim Fry, left, and Don Donelson, are partners in a worm farm business called Midwest Organic Enterprises. The duo show off some of their product at the business in LeRoy.

Nightcrawlers, traditionally sold as fishing bait, are not terribly hardy.

“The big thing people do with a nightcrawler is put it in a bucket and slap a lid on it,” Donelson said. “They can’t breathe and they can’t stand the heat.” Most anglers, Donelson said, have experienced the “worm soup” that a plastic foam container of nightcrawlers becomes after a day at the lake. But the European nightcrawlers that Donelson raises are much more hardy.

“Our European nightcrawlers will withstand 100 degree weather,” he said. “So they don’t need refrigeration, as long as they have air. These little guys withstand the heat.”

Tiger worms are the workhorses of the compost heap, eating organic material at a rate that would make a sumo wrestler blush. Tiger worms are one of the fastest breeding worms and are able to double their population every three months.

But it is their castings, or excrement, that enriches the soil they live in. It’s the castings that Donelson and his partners are banking on to grow their business.

Donelson’s worms live the life of luxury in wooden flats on shelves in the metal building behind his home. The flats are filled with a special bedding mix or composted horse manure that has been mixed with peat moss, and the worms are fed a special grain mixture for optimal growth.

“We have 28 beds (flats), with 25 pounds of worms per bed,” Donelson said. “That’s more than 25,000 worms per bed.”

Don Donelson holds a handful of tiger worms.

The worms grow and reproduce and Donelson and Fry harvest the fertile castings.

“Castings are a great fertilizer,” he said. “It will not burn plants and is completely safe to use.” Separating the castings from the nightcrawlers, cocoons and dirt is accomplished via a large, screen-covered machine Donelson calls a harvester. To demonstrate, Donelson takes a shovel, dips it into a flat of worms and dumps the matter onto a conveyor belt.

As the matter reaches the end of the belt, it is sprinkled into the spinning harvester, where it is sifted as it passes through various sizes of mesh. The first material to be separated is the castings. “That is what we call black gold,” Donelson said. “It is odorless and safe to use and makes great fertilizer.”

Don Donelson shovels worms and dirt into a separator that sifts the casting, cocoons, worms and soil into various bins in his shed behind his home in LeRoy. Donelson is a co-owner of Midwest Organic Enterprises with Jim Fry.

Donelson and his partners sell wholesale nightcrawlers to a small number of vendors in Kansas and Oklahoma, but they admit the greatest emphasis of their business right now is to market the castings.

“We really thought our market would be fishing worms,” he said. “Then we found out about the castings.” The partners are concentrating on filling spring and summer orders for garden centers in northeast Kansas and are hoping more gardeners will hear their message about organic fertilization.

“It’s just a matter of education,” he said. “We’ve been doing some garden shows and talking to more people about it. We just have to get them used to using it.

“We’re working on a shoestring right now. But one of these days, we just might break even.”