What do the worms do for the Palouse soil?
Earthworms in general are very good at aerating the soil. If they’re the type of worm that comes to the surface to feed, they’re actually making large pores in the soil, and that really helps water to infiltrate, and we like that. We like that a lot, because when you don’t have good infiltration, you tend to have a lot of run-off, and when you have run-off, you tend to have erosion. So they can help prevent erosion by creating those channels and allowing better infiltration. It also allows air, oxygen to diffuse into the soil fairly readily, so that the plant roots will get the oxygen that they need. They are very important in nutrient cycling. So they come to the surface perhaps and feed on this litter material you see here – the thatch layer – and they just physically break it down into very small pieces; and when that is in the earthworm’s gut, it’s constantly being mixed up with microbes and soil, so you have a good environment there for decomposition of the litter material, and th
