Worms Against Chemicals: Kurdistan's First Vermicompost Plant Opens

Three unemployed agricultural graduates have launched the Kurdistan Region's first vermicompost plant, using millions of imported red earthworms to convert animal waste into organic fertilizer on the Sharazoor plain near Sulaimani.

The venture, approved by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) under a policy encouraging youth entrepreneurship, operates under the name "Khaki Sharazoor" (Sharazoor Soil). It positions itself as an answer to two entrenched problems: soil degradation from decades of unscientific chemical farming and a stagnant public-sector job market.

"We, as three agricultural graduates who did not find employment opportunities in the public sector, thought of a game-changing plan: returning to nature to produce the best organic fertilizer through breeding the soil's red worms," Rojyar Sirwan, one of the founders, told The New Region during a tour of the facility.

The founders spent five years studying the region's farmland before committing. Their findings were blunt.

"We found that the Kurdistan Region's agriculture sector and agricultural lands are in a bad situation due to the unscientific use of chemical fertilizers that have led to the annihilation of the Region's red worms in the soil," Sirwan said.

The team imported large quantities of red earthworms and now breeds them in a moist, controlled environment where the worms digest agricultural and animal waste. "As a result of the biological process inside the worms' stomachs after eating the animal waste, they produce a waste that is a final, high-quality, purely organic fertilizer called vermicompost," Sirwan explained.

Lab-Backed Claims

A laboratory analysis from the Kirkuk Directorate of Agriculture's Department of Irrigation and Modern Technologies, Water, and Soil Management Branch, provided to The New Region, recorded a pH of 6.94 and electrical conductivity of 1.2 mS/cm for the finished product. The material contained 1.9 percent total nitrogen, 0.72 percent total phosphorus, 0.4 percent total potassium, 30.8 percent organic carbon, a carbon-to-nitrogen ratio of 16.4, and moisture content of 59.6 percent on a dry-weight basis.

Those figures describe a nutrient-rich organic amendment with a stabilized carbon-to-nitrogen ratio and near-neutral pH suitable for agricultural soils, though further testing is needed to establish its full agronomic and safety profile.

Sirwan said the worm humus introduces beneficial microbes and plant growth hormones that boost root development and fight soil-borne threats such as fungi and nematodes. Applied for three consecutive years, he claimed, the product renews the fertility of exhausted soil by the fourth year.

A Public Health Argument

Agricultural consulting engineer Sharokh Mohammed, owner of a Mega Farm and a backer of the project, framed the venture as a response to a public health crisis. Farmers across the region rely on smuggled, expired, or banned pesticides and chemical fertilizers containing heavy metals like cadmium and lead, applied excessively without safety degradation periods. The result, he said, is hazardous residue on market produce and a documented rise in gastrointestinal cancers, leukemia, and chronic illness.

"The vermicompost project is the first private initiative to develop agricultural projects and deal with two main issues in the Kurdistan Region: infertility due to excessive usage of chemical fertilizers and far away from scientific methods, and unhealthy crops that lead to many kinds of cancer, as ratified by many researchers," Mohammed told The New Region.

He added that government laboratories tested the product and delivered "excellent" results as a ready-made plant food.

Regulation presented its own hurdle. "Since it is very rare and new, there is no guidelines or laws regulating establishing such a business, but for the sake of supporting local businesses, the KRG Ministry of Agriculture in Sulaimani permitted us to fulfil the project," Sirwan said.

Mohammed recalled that officials were initially skeptical. "Due to a misunderstanding of the initiative, related government bodies initially showed a cold shoulder to the project, but after tests confirmed many positive benefits such as increasing productivity and increasing the quality of crops that last longer in refrigerated plants, they supported the initiative," he said.

Scaling Up

The plant currently employs 12 local workers, and the founders say their product undercuts imported chemical fertilizers on price. They have submitted a formal proposal to the Kurdistan Region Investment Board seeking a license for a larger facility.

"The KRG imports 200,000 tons of chemical fertilizers, and through investing in such a local project, it would limit the outflow of millions of dollars out of the country," Mohammed said.

The bid aligns with broader momentum across Iraq, where the fertilizer sector is undergoing a multi-billion-dollar overhaul aimed at replacing roughly $155 million in annual imports with domestic production. If the Investment Board approves the Sharazoor expansion, worm castings could move from a 12-worker pilot to a substitute for a share of those imports.