Vermiculture for human nutrition across scales - potentials and limitations

With rapid population growth and limited land availability, food security is increasingly threatened in many parts of the world. To address these challenges, future food systems need to provide additional, affordable and healthy food, without adding pressure on limited resources, particularly farmland. A promising novel food that can be produced on little land are earthworms. They are traditionally consumed by different cultures around the world and recent studies support their value as a high-quality alternative protein source. Earthworms can be reared on organic wastes to produce protein-rich earthworm biomass and vermicompost, a high value organic fertilized, as a byproduct. Future food systems could utilize the ecological function of earthworms as decomposers to create economic value, food and fertilizer, from waste. However, the scale at which these benefits can be harnessed best is still unclear. Accordingly, in this study we performed a SWOT analysis to compare three model scenarios of vermiculture for human nutrition to elucidate the potentials and limitations present at different scales