Book Review: The Nightcrawlers

The Nightcrawlers: A Story of Worms, Cows, and Cash in the Underground Bait Industry, by Joshua Steckley (2025). Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

On a cool, damp Canadian night, hundreds of workers scour fields outside Toronto looking for dew worms. The worms, known as “nightcrawlers,” are picked and sold by the millions as recreational fishing bait throughout North America. In The Nightcrawlers, Joshua Steckley presents the dew worm industry as a peculiar case whereby “the progression of capitalist development” (11) has not materialized because it has not been the subject of investment in scientific research, technology, breeding techniques, or inputs geared towards increasing production. Since the 1950s, agrarian production throughout the world has been transformed by industrial development – but, for Steckley, the Canadian nightcrawler industry appears to be frozen in time. Indeed, The Nightcrawlers explains how and why the industry appears so unchanged. Steckley argues that nightcrawler production is limited by the ecological processes that determine when, where, and how many nightcrawlers can be picked and sold, in turn shaping how capital can be used to design labor, technology, and rent for the purposes of value production and accumulation.

The tension between capital, nature, and labor in the nightcrawler industry unfolds through the material changes caused by natural processes during capital accumulation. Steckley tracks these changes through the perspectives of the various dramatis personae involved in the industry, an ensemble that includes the nightcrawlers, dairy farmers, worm-pickers, crew chiefs who employ worm-pickers, and worm wholesalers who purchase worms from crew chiefs (7). Each chapter is framed by one of these actors to illustrate the various ways in which capital has uneven control of nature and labor throughout the production process of the nightcrawler commodity.

The first two chapters center nightcrawlers to show how social, historical, and ecological contingencies shaped their commodification and constrained production to alfalfa fields in southwestern Ontario. Chapter 1 historicizes the commodification of nightcrawlers. Due to their broad attractiveness to fish, nightcrawlers gained recognition as the best bait among recreational freshwater fishermen throughout North America. As recreational fishing and demand for bait increased, southwestern Ontario emerged as the most productive source of nightcrawlers, with its amenable soils and abundant labor supply resulting from Canada’s post-World War II immigration policies. The second chapter tracks how crew chiefs sought specific ecological conditions in southwestern Ontario that favored greater production of nightcrawlers because they could not totally control the arc of the production process themselves. Physiological and ecological characteristics of nightcrawlers – including slow maturation, long cocoon gestation, large spatial requirements, and nighttime behavior – made commercial cultivation difficult. As a result, crew chiefs were forced to seek out the most productive land to increase their profits. This entailed a shift of worm picking to dairy farmers’ alfalfa fields in the 1970s and into the 1980s.

The remaining chapters follow nightcrawler production from the perspectives of its human actors – though always returning to how they impact, and are impacted by, the realities of nightcrawler ecology. Chapter 3 describes how crew chiefs rent access to land from dairy farmers to harvest greater quantities of worms. Arrangements made between dairy farmers and crew chiefs mediate ecological factors (such as how often manure is applied to a field) in an attempt to maximize nightcrawler production. Once worms are picked, they pass from crew chiefs to worm wholesalers who must navigate a cut-throat informal economy to maximize surplus. Along these lines, Chapter 4 discusses how low barriers to entry enable wholesalers to regularly undercut the price of nightcrawlers and increase wages to entice workers and customers away from competitors. The variability of nightcrawler production further facilitates crew chiefs and worm wholesalers to engage in tax fraud and money laundering as they vie for profit.

The surplus value extracted through the aforementioned strategies is used by crew chiefs and worm wholesalers to procure increasingly scarce labor. As such, the fifth and sixth chapters consider the structure of labor and the power dynamics between worm-pickers and their employers. Chapter 5 describes the workforce and the strenuous labor of worm-picking. Most worm-pickers are Southeast Asian and Vietnamese women who immigrated to Canada between the 1960s and 1980s. With limited employment opportunities, they found potentially high-paying work spending long nights crouched over picking worms. The sixth chapter unpacks the freedom-based rhetoric of worm-pickers; “freedom,” in this regard, relates to the significant control that worm-pickers have over the terms of their labor because their employers cannot control when worms appear above ground to be harvested. However, freedom is not identical for all workers. Non-status immigrants, who become worm-pickers through a Temporary Foreign Workers Program, face increasing precarity because they cannot switch employers for better working conditions or pay without facing potential deportation.

The Nightcrawlers concludes by outlining the possible trajectories for this industry and the necessity of analyzing its labor relations. As Chapter 7 shows, the nightcrawler industry is grappling with a shrinking labor pool, lack of farmers willing to rent their land, declining customer demand, and a decreasing number of picking nights and fishing days due to climate change. Considering these challenges, Steckley underscores the experimental nature of capital to extract surplus value amidst changing conditions. At the same time, the contested and ever-shifting relations between capital, labor, and nature fundamentally constrain the industry. The materiality of nightcrawler ecology prevents capitalists from fully taking control in every aspect of production. These dynamics have significant ramifications for the agency and identity of worm-pickers, who leverage their labor for better working conditions but also grapple with structural and racial barriers to gaining the privileges associated with residency status.

By examining the nightcrawler industry, Steckley offers a valuable case study of how informal economies are entangled with capitalism but in accidental, contingent, and unstable ways. The Nightcrawlers, in this regard, is a welcome contribution to the growing body of literature concerning the commodification of nature. This book will be of interest to a wide variety of readers; scholars of labor relations, rural sociology, and commodity studies will find this book especially informative for its methodological and theoretical insights, which are situated at the interface of critical agrarian studies and political economy.