man living with insects to clear away rubbish at home

Sorry dude. I have never heard of anything so ridiculous in my whole life. But good luck searching!

I assume youre doing a thesis in agriculture? The topic you seek is "vermiculture and solid waste management'. However, I have never heard of someone living in an insect pile. Ive known vermiculturists whove had large frames wherein they would add various solid waste mixtures and allow worms to transform the waste by reducing its volume and changing its physicsal and chemical composition.

A story about a guy living with bugs seems more like a tall tale than anything worth studying.
Dont you have to submit outline sections of your thesis for routine discussions with your committee?

hey farmerman,

your right! i am doing my architecture thesis on vertical farm house in the city. And i read some agriculture books which says that some farmers grows an artificial forest near their agriculture land in order to stimulate the environment of a natural forest. In doing so, it starts to attract a lot birds, insects and etc to the place. These insects and animals then help to pollinate their crops. therefore i am proposing a vertical farmhouse not just having land for the crops n house but also some land for trees to grow in the building. Because with the fallen leaves from the trees, it can also help to fertilise the soil. So there is a kind of ecology between the farming land and the artifical nature that is created within the highrise building.

One of the tutor said that the idea was a romanticized one. But my friend told me that he saw a documentary a long time ago which he couldnt really remember the exact details abt these man who grows insects n bugs at home to take away his rubbish and waste at home. therefore i am looking for stories like these to support my idea of the ecology between nature and man.

In the US , it was quite popular to construct "Vermifills" to get rid of solid waste (at least reduce its volume) while growing a culture of worms that would provide castings. The concept was popular in the mid 80's then went away after the few cities that adopted the concept had run up large costs in "pre sorting " and running separate trash lines for the items that dont compost, (like cans, plastics, bottles etc). The waste that didnt composts became a bigger deal than the waste that did. Much of the hazardous components were in the noncompostables.

Guano caves are natural examples of composting on a natural scale, however, I dont think anybody would volunteer to live in an active guano cave/

1Bat poop and urine "rains " from the cave ceilings where the bats live

2The guano piles are quite toxic with gases and microbes.

3The floors are alive with guano insects, quite creepy.

Sorry cant help any more but if you go to a US EPA website and drop in vermiculture, Im sure itlle give you a start of information.

As far as composting, look up the mushroom growers sites. I know that present technology for mushroom composting is all done in vaulted buildings with moisture and air feed channels to keep the compost from going anaerobic. The mixtures they use are bulk analyzed to maintain broad ratios of PKN and carbon(in the form of straw, coconut husks, sugar cane chaff and woodchps) The nutrients are in the form of manures, gypsum, greensand, and some urea. The mixture is stuffed into large concrete bins with water spray heads at the top and forced air channels at the bottom. The entire thing is sensored up so that composting temps of 160F are maintained (air is the key). THen the compost is allowed to work for only about 2 weeks when its pulled out and set in rows to cool and ship off to mushroom houses.
The compost facilities Im familiar with are about 75' wide by 150' long and 30' high and the building is literally stuffed full with bulldozers and graders. They start with about 125000yds of raw stuff and wind up with about 30000yds of compost per charge.

Nobody can live in a sealed compost facility, its way too hot, itd kill ya.

my uncle trafford had what he called the worm hilton on his piece of land outside Richmond, VA it was a big pit with storm cellar doors and lots of great garden soil created by worm castings from his kitchen refuse.

The way to make this idea work is to find animals who's natural behavior is to carry food (human left-overs) back to their own living areas, without pooping in your house while they are doing it.

Most insects eat where they find the food, and poop indiscriminately. Mice are similar.

The only insects likely to "carry away" food material are ants. For example, where army ants forage (in large raiding swarms), they are sometimes encouraged (or rather, not discouraged) to enter human dwellings to clear the home of other insects and waste food.

The natural behavior of many ant species is to carry all food back to the colony.

If you could genetically engineer a species of ant to swarm through your house once at day at noon, and carry every scrap of debris back to their nest, you would have a very nice cleaning service.

Explore this site: The house that Mike built.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/planet/house/default.htm

A key to the house's astonishing water efficiency and waste disposal is a nifty low-maintenance recycling system that lives under the back deck.

All the dirty water from the house (toilet, shower, bath, dishwasher, washing machine, sinks and tubs) drains into a single sewer pipe that empties into an underground concrete tank. Food scraps and other biodegradable waste (both theirs and the neighbours') are added through a hatch in the deck.
Inside the tank are three filter beds - layers of sand and peat packed with worms and bugs of all sizes and tastes. As the sewage works its way through this organic industrial disposal unit, it gets chewed up, spat out and generally cleaned by the organisms, in much the same way that rainwater is naturally filtered by soil before entering river systems.
The water exiting the other end of the tank is clean enough to be reused in the house as grey water to flush toilets, wash clothes and water the garden and any excess overflows into a dry reed bed. Any residual nasty bacteria or viruses are killed off as the water leaves the tank with a UV radiation zapper (powered by a small solar panel). The water looks clear, has absolutely no foul smell, and is clean enough to drink (although not recommended)... and shirts from the washing machine look just as white and fresh as those from the best suburban laundromats.

The system did suffer three smelly breakdowns during its first year, the result of the unusually long, narrow tank specifically designed for the small yard, but it now functions perfectly, requiring no maintenance and producing no offensive smells.

In US, there are quite a few municipality sized sewage treatment systems that use a series of oxidation ponds , open clarifiers, and final contact /storage then the effluent is pumped to spray or drip irrigation systems on farmland. Its land intensive but is much more ecofriendly to streams . It works best for communuities where there arent huge loads of synthetic organic compounds like pharma wastes or industrial chemicals.

FM's last sentence is the most important


America is always buying into ecology as long as its quick, painless, and doesn't take any thought or action, and especially if its uncomplicated. We have bought into the notion of using waste as a "green" fertilizer which solves a multitude of problems simultaneously and doesn't really call for any behavioral changes on our part.


One of these is the reuse of waste to replace industrial fertilizer. FM's last sentence reminded me how easy this is to say, how difficult to accomplish. One doesn't need to be downstream of a large pharma factory to have overwhelming amounts of pharmaceuticals in the waste stream. Just being downstream from a chicken "farm" operation that contains 1.5 millions chickens and you will have all the antibiotics, growth hormones, fungicides, etc. in the waste stream that you could possibly want. Or having your nice suburban housing project downstream from a large farm trucking in this refuse as fertilizer for their corn crop. Heck you may even stop at their summer stand to get your kids some fresh corn-on-the-cob.

When people near these "job creator industries" finally realize the true impact they are having and try to put a stop to it big business just steps in. this has been seen in places like the Carolina's where counties started to push back with regulations on size of the industry and requirements of proper disposal. Big business just went to the state governments, laws were passed to remove county authority over the practices and put them at the state level.

Things went on as business wanted the whinny locals were shut up and everyone lived happily ever after. That is, UNTIL major hurricanes hit the areas in the 1990's and environmental damage from the toxic materials in the holding ponds were spread over many counties. Not to worry our federal tax dollars, to the tune of about 5 billion dollars were used for the clean up. The factories profits remained high, stocks in the companies were unaffected, locals choked on the ammonia and sulfur compounds in the air, and lots of illegals were imported into the area for cheap labor. Again everyone was happy, well, everyone who counted anyway.

If your wondering how things are going today in this arena and the spiffy job regulators are playing in protecting your health you can read this.

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gbpCMPX9_kRtYkL1Yv9-OzuVxFfQD8V86OUG0
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1TCR Farm waste streams arent connected to municipal waste systems. So your point is not really valid.


2I always get a kick out of suburban "developers" who want to have their developments located next to a fram (for the rural character), and then the homewoners bitch (once safely ensconsed) that all farmimng should cease because of issues that TCR mentions. This becomes a self fulfilling prophecy because the farmer then says "screw It' and tries to have his land sold and subdivided. Meanwhile, during the entire development process, the suburbanites try to fight the farmer from exercising the rights included with land ownsership. Recent movers to "ruburbs" feel that everything should stop once they are moved in.