The Worm Hunters of Southern Ontario
August 12, 2025 at 09:45PMIt’s slimy, slippery work done under the cover of darkness in an industry that’s worth $200 million (CAD) to the Canadian economy. Follow Inori Roy into the worm picking fields of Ontario, Canada as she learns the history and practice of harvesting nightcrawlers from the ground up.
As we make our way into the field, one of the drivers lends me a pair of neon orange latex gloves. My first hour in the field is spent alternating between scanning the ground with my flashlight, trying and failing to get a firm enough grip on the worms to pull them out of the dirt, and staring, awestruck, at the pickers as they work. The view is otherworldly: dozens of worm pickers working the land under the dim light of LED headlamps glowing red, instead of white, to ease the strain on the human eye and to avoid scaring off the worms. When you look at the field from a distance, against the backdrop of a pitch-dark country sky heavy with clouds, it feels a little like being on Mars, witnessing a colony of three-foot-tall, red glowing aliens scour through the dirt.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/08/12/the-worm-hunters-of-southern-ontario/
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