1. Introduction
We have recently developed the concept of ‘high-rate vermicomposting’
(Abbasi et al., 2015) which enables substrates such as weeds,
agricultural waste, and paper waste to be directly and rapidly
vermicomposted. Pre-existing vermireacors have been unable to handle
such wastes for reasons detailed earlier (Abbasi et al., 2015).
We have also shown that vermicomposts derived from even toxic and
allelopathic weeds like parthenium and ipomoea are benign organic
fertilizers, as effective as manure-based vemricomposts are known to be
(Hussain and Abbasi, 2018). The machine acronymed HEVSTOW (High
Efficiency Vertically Stacked vermicomposting system for Treating
Organic Waste), being presented here, has been designed to derive
maximum advantage from the positive attributes of the high-rate
vermicomposting paradigm. No similar machine has been designed or
developed earlier, and after ascertaining its novelty in the context of
global prior art, a patent has been granted to it (Tauseef et
al., 2018). In the present paper the efficacy of the machine has been
demonstrated by its utilization in simultaneous vermicomposting of two
different substrates with two different species of earthworms.