“You have no one to control you. You can be yourself. You can work by yourself.”
Nearly every bait worm sold in North America is hand-picked from Ontario farmland by immigrant workers using headlamps at night. The industry moves $200 million a year and harvests up to 700 million worms annually. Canadian nightcrawlers live six feet underground and can’t be farmed commercially, so this entire supply chain depends on human hands in the dark. Climate change, declining demand from younger generations, and shifting immigration patterns are all squeezing an industry that most people never knew existed in the first place.