A FARMING family have high hopes for their subterranean new business.

Brothers Callum and Jordan Taylor, from Eden Farm, near Hamsterley, County Durham, set up their own internet worm and compost-supply business after they were both made unemployed.

They are now breeding tens of thousands of worms in barrels in a stable at their family’s 40-acre sheep farm, two miles south of Hamsterley Forest.

The brothers have been supported by their father, Paul Taylor, and the Enterprise Agency in Wear Valley and Teesdale.

“The farm isn’t big enough to make a lot of money,” said Paul.

“The two lads were not working and we knew they had to look inwardly rather than outwardly when it came to deciding how they were going to make a living.

“Both wanted to stay in farming, but Jordan is disabled so the worm farm seemed to make a lot of sense.”

Jordan, 23, and Callum, 19, will share duties in the running of the business, which will be called Eden Worms and Compost.

Blue-nosed earthworms will be bred in the one-metresquare barrels, which will be filled each week with a new layer of composted horse manure from livery yards in the area.

When the barrels are full, they will be emptied and the top layer will become the base layer in a new barrel.

The worms will then be separated from the rest of the broken-down manure.

The worms will either be sold back to the supplier or sold as fishing bait online or at the region’s fishing tackle shops.

Meanwhile, the brokendown manure – transformed into fine, nutrition-rich worm castings – will be used as compost or mixed with other materials and used as mulch.

The Taylor family have received a £10,000 matchfunded grant from the Rural Development Programme for England and hope to have 80 bins, each containing 1,000 worms, by the end of the year. “It might not be an instant success, but we have all done a lot of research and we don’t think there is anything like this in the area,” said Paul.

“At some point it would be good to do some kind of educational work and get schools out to the farm to learn about worms and the composting element of it,”

said Callum.

Douglas Palarm, business start-up advisor for the Enterprise Agency in Wear Valley and Teesdale, helped the Taylor family create a business plan for the worm farm.

“When I saw they wanted to create a worm farm I was a bit sceptical, but once I talked to the lads, saw their farm and saw what they had in mind and the research they had done, I was convinced they could make a real success of it,” said Mr Palarm.

“Now, three or four months down the line they have got this funding and are making a real go of it.”

The Taylors’ company website, edenwormsand compost.com, will be online by the end of this month.