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View Full Version : Hey josh....do you know these people??? Worm picker brawl! Lol lol



CRAZY70MAN
03-30-2011, 07:16 PM
I almost sharted my pants when I read this....this is for you Kintore....omg.....They really claim the worm picking capital Ontario????For real.........read those 5 headlines down towards bottom!!!! lol lol lol..........still LMFAO!! Hope Tim doesnt get ahold of this in time for trikefest smack talk?? I am sure he could come up with a shirt for this?? lol

WRIGGLY
FACTS & FIGURES
Number of worm species identified in Canada: 25

Number of segments in a full grown dew-worm: approximately 150, all of them capable of sensing light and touch

Average length of a dew-worm: about 25 centimetres, roughly the height of this page

Life expectancy: approximately seven to nine years

Number of worms that can fit in a regulation worm-picking coffee can: 400 to 600

Number of offspring a dew-worm produces each year: 10 to 12



UNDERGROUND
ECONOMY
Estimated number of seasonal worm pickers: 2,000 to 3,000 across Canada

Amount a skilled picker can make in a night: about $75

Amount a less experienced picker may make: as little as $15

Length of a picker's workday: generally eight hours, from dusk 'til dawn

Number of good picking nights: on average, only 60 to 70 per year, from March to November

Worm-picking capital of Canada: Ontario

Other worm-picking regions: the Montréal area, the Maritimes and British Columbia

Tax implications: Despite the difficulties of monitoring a seasonal and nocturnal industry, Revenue Canada insists it keeps a close watch on worm picking to ensure tax laws are respected.


For decades, such ecumenical gatherings have been a familiar sight on the lawns, farms and fairways of Windsor, London, Toronto, Kingston and all points between, the bottom rung of an industry whose annual exports have been estimated - because no one really knows - at anywhere between $40 and $100 million. The business is secretive, slippery and occasionally sordid. To the Canadian and American middlemen who stand between the burrow and the bait bucket it can be immensely profitable or brutally fickle.

Newspaper headlines from the past few years offer a snapshot of a renegade trade:

"WORM PICKERS' BRAWL INJURES 13"

"600,000 DEW-WORMS STOLEN FROM LEASIDE BAIT COMPANY"

"FIREARM CHARGE DISMISSED IN ROW WITH WORM PICKERS"

"DRIVER, 35, CHARGED AFTER WORM PICKERS HURT IN CRASH"

"PICKERS STEALING HIS WORMS, FARMER SAYS"

In the field, the mechanics of the harvest are much less colourful. As a worm pokes its anterior end out of its hole, seeking food or a fellow hermaphrodite with whom to swap sperm, the picker pounces, yanking the victim clear of the ground before the worm's head can tell the worm's tail to hold on for dear life. This alien abduction is repeated every four or five seconds, a thousand times an hour on a good, warm, wet night, enabling a skilful picker to gather upwards of 6,000 victims — at $15 to $30 per thousand, depending on demand — in one session. The record, it is said, is 22,500 worms in one night, by one man, with only two hands.

This night, on a farm near the Canada's Wonderland amusement park, a 20-minute drive northwest from downtown Toronto, no one will come close to that standard. A late-day thunderstorm has softened the soil after weeks of rainless heat, but now a cold front has muscled in, the temperature is diving toward zero and the wind is screaming like a jet engine, conditions that discourage all but the most starved and sex-starved annelids from emerging.

Still, the pickers persevere. In the back of a boxy five-tonne truck with bench seats and a few doors and windows cut into its cargo hold, they prepare for their long night's labour, swaddling themselves in multiple strata of plastic ponchos and slickers against the chill.

Suitably insulated, the harvesters bind coffee cans to each leg - one for the worms, one for sawdust to keep their fingers dry - and mount a miner's lamp and a nine-volt battery on their heads. Then they trudge off to a fallow, muddy soybean field to begin the backbreaking enterprise that might earn them, on this blustery night, $80 or $100 before dawn.

Their prey is astonishingly copious. Even in this rainless hurricane, each square metre of the surface contains at least a dozen visible worms, many of them locked in mating pairs, ripe for the plucking. But getting them takes skill and a firm, but not too firm, grip - the worms slide backwards into their dormitories in less than a second when touched. Only whole animals are wanted. The common belief that earthworms torn in half can regenerate themselves is folklore. Ripped anywhere except for a few segments near their anterior, they quickly die.

Kintore
03-31-2011, 02:22 AM
LOL im telling ya, they are REAL and EVERYWHERE! LMAO you and me should be worm watching one night!

RoscoW
03-31-2011, 06:19 AM
I'll back you Josh, Warm Summer nights I've seen busloads show up at different places. They are real

Ross..

CRAZY70MAN
03-31-2011, 09:10 PM
lol............are you guys sh$%%#@ me??????? For real?????? I gotta see this........i person... "Worm pickers brawl".......still LMFAO dude...............

hillbilly 200x
03-31-2011, 09:41 PM
my dad once told me about a bunch of people that used to sneak into my grandfather farm to pick for worm, he had alot of fun chasing after them on my grandfathers big red. lol this was back in 86-87

CRAZY70MAN
04-01-2011, 05:33 AM
my dad once told me about a bunch of people that used to sneak into my grandfather farm to pick for worm, he had alot of fun chasing after them on my grandfathers big red. lol this was back in 86-87

"Drop the worms".........."Drop em".........lol..lol

beets442
04-02-2011, 03:58 AM
Nothing lower than a worm thief....