Impact Awards—2025 Talent Award: Joshua Steckley

Joshua Steckley advises young researchers to “look around your world and be curious about the things you see in your daily life.”

This is advice he followed while he was a PhD student. During that time, he dug into something that had first caught his attention in high school: on the farms surrounding his hometown of New Hamburg, Ontario, he noticed workers would head into the fields at night to pluck earthworms. Little was known about the worm-picking industry’s economic value or labour dynamics, until Steckley began his empirical research.

“It’s an underground industry, literally and figuratively,” he says.

For being the first to chart the commodification of the dew worm (also known as the Canadian nightcrawler), the Banting postdoctoral fellow at Carleton University is the winner of the 2025 SSHRC Impact Award in the Talent category.

Each year, as many as 700 million worms are handpicked from Ontario farmland under cover of night, when they’re most active. Southwestern Ontario is an ideal home for nightcrawlers, which thrive in the manure-rich soil of the region’s dairy farms, making it the “Worm Capital of the World.”

“My research really provides information to the public about something that we see all around us,” Steckley says. “If you go to any gas station, you'll see a big sign that says, ‘Worms.’ And yet nobody really knows how or where they come from.”

Canadian nightcrawlers are considered premium bait, prized by recreational anglers around the world. In fact, dew worms are likely the most valuable cash crops in the region. Farmers net a profit of around $250 per acre of corn, but can get up $1,200 for worms per acre, says Steckley.

He has written a book about his research, The Nightcrawlers: A Story of Worms, Cows, and Cash in the Underground Bait Industry. His work shines a light on the economic impact, labour relations and ecological dynamics of the worm-picking industry.

Something that surprised him over the course of his research was the way in which labourers (often immigrants or migrant workers) were able to exercise power, because worm wholesalers have a hard time finding people to take on the difficult, nighttime work.

“They kind of have to pull out all of the stops, providing free transportation to the farm, giving them money if they need a loan, just to attract as much labour as they can.”

Another surprising finding was how some farmers have worked worm-picking into their crop rotation to benefit both their land and their bottom line.

“One farmer told me he rented his land to worm-pickers for an entire year. It gave him a chance to leave his land fallow and let it rest for a year, while still earning a sizeable income.”

Steckley’s reputation as “the Worm Guy” has even been recognized at an international level. He has been approached by soil researchers in the Netherlands, who want to inoculate nightcrawlers into Dutch pastureland, and by University of Michigan researchers, who want to understand and reduce the human spread of exotic earthworms. Beyond academia, Steckley has provided data on farm rental rates and the sustainability of worm-picking to farmers and the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Agribusiness.

“The farmers now have a much better understanding of earthworm dynamics in their fields, and government officials have a better idea of the size of the industry and its value,” he says.

Next, Steckley is turning his attention to the rising importance of bull semen in agricultural management. Dairy farmers are using genetic information to select certain features in their herd, such as cows that produce more protein-rich milk or more easily digestible milk, for people with dairy sensitivities. Farmers can also select cows that will produce lower levels of methane, which can help to reduce a farm’s carbon emissions.

“The ongoing theme of my research is really about capitalism's control over nature and how that influences control over labour,” he says. “We really do need to understand this relationship, if we want to have any kind of sustainable future.”