wormfarming - does it help with clay soil?

I am pondering weather or not I should give wormfarming a shot. It would be mainly for our big garden which is very heavy clay with no to little drainage. In drought it's like concrete and in flood the water table is at the soil surface. The whole garden is on a slope 1:10.
I have two goals with it:
1) Improve the clay soil
2) Use the castings for my potting mix (we have a small nursery and selling perennial edible plants), I think it would improve the mix greatly.
I would like to start it in a way that is big enough for the nursery and our 3/4 acre plot.

What are your experiences with worms and clay soil? Does it help or is it just another pet to look after?

Earthworms can help a lot with clay soil, but will die without access to air if totally flooded out. Compost inhabiting red worms will produce excellent biota rich castings that will help form soil aggregates with your clay that help drainage and aeration.

I think the Johnson Su “B.EA.M” method is a very worthwhile investment of time and material for a cubic yard or two of inoculation quality wormcastings a year later. Just piling a mix of worm food and bedding in a future garden site or amidst the garden is also an option if pets or other animals getting into it are not an issue.

Broadforking (or using a digging fork for lighter work) is also good for loosening clay through aeration, facilitating biological activity and organic matter buildup, which will bring in more worms and the like with all their aerating and water infiltrating tunnels. A worm pulls air into the soil as it burrows up to two meters vertically each day, and this will help any plant roots work their way down as well. Organic mulch also helps provide worm habitat if you want a more passive approach.

Hi.
Earthworms castings are worthy in almost any situation I can think of. I guess you would feed your worms, then use their castings as manure.

As you should already know, hard clay kills most plants when it dries. A few plants can survive this mistreatment, which are the natives that you see in dry season. But very often you don't want the yield from the natives. They may still be useful in that they provide shelter, flowers, shade and mulch for your system.
But other than that, you mostly want to keep your soil moist, so you can grow crops with more desirable yields.
Hard clay is slow to soak and slow to drain, so it's both dangerous for the lack of water and for the risk of rotting. It needs many plant roots, microbes and bugs to make a good structure that allows water to sink in without rotting. But this life have a hard time setting in a hard clay soil. It's a vicious loop: without water, plants are killed, without plants, water is hard to hold or drain.
A way to break this loop is to introduce yourself these life all at once. Earthworms castings have a good selection and variety of microbes for the task.
It starts with a small patch you can take care of. Have your plants with some worm manure (or even better, irrigate with fertilized water), lots of mulch, and make sure it stays moist. In some cases, the plants may also need wind and sun shelter. Once these plants are established, they will help water retention, and less attention will be necessary, allowing the gardener to expand to other areas.

You may get a similar result with a good compost, made from the plants in you area with the right proportions for the crops you want to grow and potentially in bigger quantities. But it's easier with worms.

Adding potting soil to the clay also works, but it is expensive and it won't last unless you inocculate the microbes and let your plants make their job.


EDIT. Are worms just another pet to take care for?
Hmm. It depends on how you use it. For example, if you put a bunch of worms in a worm tower inside your gardening beds, then you just have to throw vegetables discards in the hole from time to time, not different than applying manure now and then. It will work as long as you bed stays moist. Very little work, but only works in one bed.
If you can't make big compost piles (our case), then worms is the best option, even if you need to take care of them (they just want some shade and some water, protection from rodents, and veg scraps). Separating the manure from the worms might be the most difficult part. We grow them in a bath tube, and the worm castings are usually full of worms, so our worms-lady takes a few work hours trying to save as many as she can. I think there are better methods, using layers and meshes, but so far she seems happy with the job, so we haven't changed the method. You can say she pets them, yes.
If you already have good compost, maybe feeding the finished compost to a pile of worms, while still improves the product, might not be cost-efficient.

thanks for the replies! I will have a look at the Johnson Su “B.EA.M”  method. We already planted the area but after three years the trees are still small. We planted acacias in the permie fashion which suffered in the first two years but now its getting dryer and most of them are about three meters high.
For feeding the worms I would ask at a local restaurant, we don't produce high quality compost because all it gets is the two meter high grasses we dig out and the grass we can mow we need for mulching. We get coffee grinds also.

I had a look at the flow through systems and that is what we plan to do.

At our last home we had packed clay soil and instead of digging in biomass, we put rotted hay or straw (no herbicides) on top of the soil every year. We put the straw on in one flake layers that expanded to 8-12 inches of fluffy straw. Within a year it was decomposed. Over the years the worms worked in the interface between the straw and the clay, creating a nice soil. They brought up clay from below and mixed it with the decomposed straw. If it rained a lot, they moved up into the straw for air. After years of this low tech, low work method, I could put my hand into the soil and not hit the hard clay layer.

The down side is it took a lot of biomass for this to happen. The worms will do the work though.

Gypsum will break up hard clay soil.  Keeping it covered as someone else suggested, with straw mulch helps a lot too, by protecting microbes and giving them something to feed on.  You can also use leaves.  Active microbes loosen the soil.  You can also sprinkle regular bicarbonate of soda (baking soda) evenly around and it will loosen hard packed soils.  Humic acid (humates) are formed from rotted vegetation and help sequester nutrients in the soil preventing compaction.   Worms like plenty of organic matter to feed on and love calcium.  If you feed them, they will come and they will proliferate.  Earthworms have an exudate in their skin and gut that kills all pathogens in the soil, such as e. coli, Staph, strep.   Those tunnels they make allow air to get down into the subsoil, benefitting the microbes and also the soil structure as water can then percolate through it.  Never underestimate the importance of the earthworm.