Worms, and their droppings, are big business.

But worms -- 100,000 of them -- had bolted overnight.

The Ihnats found them early the next morning. Many were clustered in balls on the barn's walls. Others cowered in corners. All were doing their best to hide from the light. "At first, I thought somebody had stuck chewing tobacco all over, until they moved," Kay Ihnat said. "And I'll tell you, when they get on the wild like that, they're not easy to gather up. They're not a big thing you can just grab."

Ihnat is a cheerful person by nature, and she cannot help but grin as she tells that story of the fledging days of the couple's business, Worm World, one of the largest such operations in the Northeast. But for increasing numbers of environmentally conscious Americans, vermiculture -- the business of raising worms -- is nothing to snicker about. The worm, the same creature that Aristotle dubbed "the intestines of the earth," may soon help arrest the growing problem of waste disposal and provide supercharged soil to boot, they believe.

"Let the others laugh," said John Ihnat as he stood beside mounds of horse manure and apple pulp outside the barn in Washington County, Pennsylvania, and just a few miles east of Ohio. "But every piece of rotting garbage that comes in here goes out as something much more valuable."What comes out are more worms, along with their droppings, known as castings. In ideal conditions, worms can double their population in 90 days. And a pound of worms can process three to five pounds of food waste a week, pumping out soil that contains five times more nitrogen, seven times more phosphorous, and 40 percent more humus than topsoil with no worms. Such enterprise has not gone unnoticed by budding entrepreneurs -- and by those who would worm their savings from them.

"The phones here are just never still," said Clive Edwards, an environmental science professor at Ohio State University who is widely regarded as the world's foremost authority on worms. "There's enormous interest out there from people who have heard they can become rich overnight." Most likely they won't cautioned Peter Bogdanov of Merlin, Oregon publisher of Casting Call, a vermiculture newsletter. "It's blue-sky potential, but you've still got to keep your eyes open for scam artists. It all sounds exciting at first, but gosh, there's a lot of work involved," he said.

Nearly 100,000 people had entered the vermiculture business by the late 1970's, until the market went bust after a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation. In many of the typical scams, would-be worm barons were sold breeding stock at greatly inflated prices with the promise that the progeny would be purchased by the seller. Most of those buy-back guarantees never materialized, noted Bogdanov, whose 1996 book, Commercial Vermiculture, How to Build a Thriving Business in Earthworms, has been praised by many.

Two decades ago, the primary end-market was worms as bait for anglers. But today, the several hundred large-scale worm wranglers in the country are focusing on the growing interest in vermicomposting, the process of turning organic debris into castings, at the household level and far beyond. Even on a small scale, worms kept in recycling trays can transform wilted lettuce, for example, into a supplement for indoor and outdoor plants. "I believe there are at least 1 million households out there, conservatively, who are practicing vermicomposting," said Mary Appelhof of Kalamazoo, Michigan, who has sold more than 100,000 copies of her self-published 1982 book,Worms Eat My Garbage.

Since 1995, at least 1,000 families in Montgomery County, Maryland, have gotten into the act through a school program offered by the county's Department of Environmental Protection. Last year, 60,000 pounds of cafeteria table scraps that were fed to worms provided fertilizer for school gardens and classroom projects, said Joe Keyser, who heads the project. "Kids are such great envoys," Keyser said. "They're great at getting the message -- and the worms -- home."

Meanwhile, a handful of the more than 4,000 composting facilities across the country are already experimenting with worms as a way to speed decay, said David Riggle, managing editor of BioCycle, a monthly journal on composting and recycling based in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. It's an up-and-coming option, especially for commercial operations. There's a value-added product at the end," he said. At the beginning, of course, is the need for a steady supply of worms. Because worms slow down their activity in the cold, most large vermiculture ventures are located in the South and West (United States).

The Ihnats gleaned what they could from visits to a dozen worm farms across the country. They countered the climate by heating the barn that once held Holsteins on the family's 77 acre dairy farm. In the spring of 1993, they bought 30,000 redworms. Last year, they sold one million, and in 1998, the 42 enclosed beds in the barn -- they had to build an addition -- house a population estimated at three million.

The Ihnats' customer base has spread across the country and Canada. Roberta Trombley, a Cincinnati educational consultant who spreads the gospel of vermicomposting across her region, said "I've never had a short count from them, never a dead worm. Their worms are reliable." Trombley bought 100 pounds of worms from Worm World last year. (One pound equals about 1,000 worms; prices start at $18 a pound.) Live deliveries are guaranteed, and the Ihnats learned early on that United Parcel Service (UPS) trucks are neither heated nor air-conditioned. Though they use UPS when the weather obliges, "there's nothing worse than having someone complain that their worms arrived frozen or baked -- and stinking," Kay Ihnat said.

There is no conspicuous odor inside the barn. Unlike nightcrawlers, which burrow six feet or more into the earth and search for decomposing debris aboveground in darkness, the domesticated redworms grown here munch away day and night just below the surface. Even though worms are hermaphroditic (possessing both male and female reproductive organs), it still takes two to make an egg-filled cocoon capable of producing two to 20 worms. Every three months or so, the soil in beds containing adults, juveniles, cocoons, and castings is shoveled into a harvester, a 12-foot-long rotating tube screened for most of its length.

Cocoons, castings, and smaller worms fall through the screen; larger worms, three to four inches long, are funneled out the other end. Half of those larger worms will be sold for vermicomposting; the other half will be rebedded in a fattening bin sold as bait. If they are fed or watered incorrectly, worms show an amazing propensity to travel. And the Ihnats discovered that an uncovered worm often wants to go exploring during the darker months of winter even if conditions seem perfect.

Predators also can take a toll. The Ihnats have, for example, occasionally entered the barn to find raccoons too bloated to budge. One trio of raccoons devoured about 20,000 worms in the night before John sealed every crack he could find. John, 49, is not yet ready to quit his day job at an engineering firm, though he puts in at least 30 hours a week with the herd. Kay, 47, did give up her job as a hospital lab technician to devote full-time to their business. She is writing every school district in the state to generate interest in Worm World's home vermicomposting systems.

"There's no backing out now," she said the other evening as she closed the barn door. "We're in too deep." One visitor stayed behind, a sparrow. "He won't eat that much. I'll shoo him off tomorrow," she said. She left one other thing in the barn, too. She left the lights on.

For more information, Worm World may be contacted at 26 Ihnat Lane, Avella, PA 15312. The phone number is 412-356-2397. On the Internet, their web site address is http://access.hky.com/~-fmt-sysworldwrld/