A single acre of black soldier fly larvae can produce more protein than 3,000 acres of cattle or 130 acres of soybeans
Washington Post Christopher Ingraham
July 3, 2019
11:59 AM EDT
Last Updated
July 3, 2019
12:46 PM EDT
COLLEGE STATION, Texas — It may be hard to understand the appeal of plunging your hand into a pile of writhing maggots. But the sensation is uniquely tactile, not at all unpleasant, as thousands of soft, plump grubs, each the size of a grain of rice, wriggle against your skin, tiny mouthparts gently poking your flesh.
For Lauren Taranow and her employees, it’s just another day at work.
Taranow is the president of Symton BSF, where the larvae of black soldier flies are harvested and sold as food for exotic pets such as lizards, birds, even hedgehogs. Her “maggot farm,” as she styles it, is part of a burgeoning industry, one with the potential to revolutionize the way we feed the world. That’s because of the black soldier fly larva’s remarkable ability to transform nearly any kind of organic waste — cafeteria refuse, manure, even toxic algae — into high-quality protein, all while leaving a smaller carbon footprint than it found.
In one year, a single acre of black soldier fly larvae can produce more protein than 3,000 acres of cattle or 130 acres of soybeans. Such yields, combined with the need to find cheap, reliable protein for a global population projected to jump 30 per cent, to 9.8 billion by 2050, present big opportunity for the black soldier fly. The United Nations, which already warns that animal-rich diets cannot stretch that far long term, is encouraging governments and businesses to turn to insects to fulfill the planet’s protein needs.
People who’ve seen what black soldier fly larvae can do often speak of them in evangelical tones. Jeff Tomberlin, a professor of entomology at Texas A&M University, said the bug industry could “save lives, stabilize economies, create jobs and protect the environment.”
“There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be doing this at some scale throughout the world,” he said.
So why aren’t we?
When the LED lights are flipped on in the fly-breeding room at Evo Conversion Systems, the whir of thousands of tiny wings fills the air as flies careen about their screened-in enclosures in search of a mate. Evo, which was founded by Tomberlin, shares a wall with Symton. The companies are separate but symbiotic: Evo hatches fly larvae and sells them to Symton, which fattens them up on a proprietary grain blend that ensures optimal nutrition for the animals that eventually will consume them.
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Hey, don’t knock them until you’ve – BARF! tried them.
‘People who’ve seen what black soldier fly larvae can do often speak of them in evangelical tones.” Well, gee whiz, another religion is in the offing with this ridiculous business.
I buy dried mealworms and put them out for the birds that come to my feeding station. They pig out on them, all varieties of birds love those things. They’d probably explode into song over dried fly larvae, because BIRDS EAT BUGS!!!! There’s a reason hooman eat meat and fish, and birds eat bugs. If that ever sinks in with these latter-day ecohippies, someone please be kind enough to let me know. Frankly, I wouldn’t touch that stuff, period, not if the last thing I had for a meal was a french fry two weeks ago. I’d be hunting birds for food.
There’s one other thing here: black soldier flies aren’t very big. Flies can easily compress themselves to go through cracks and small openings to get where they want to go. I see no benefit in breeding an acre’s worth of them, since the probability of their escaping into the wild is high and could spell a real disaster. And no one wants flies buzzing around his head – ever.
Hi Sara, – The adult black soldier fly do not eat/bite/chew – just try to mate. Egg laying is not done indoors.
If they are in an enclosed area then the adults will obviously have to fly around any human in that enclosure. But the adults will not land on the food the human has exposed (OK, might lay eggs overhead for hatchlings to passively fall into if food left out for them); nor will they try to land on the human in the enclosure for that matter.
Black soldier fly adults do not enter homes and when these are about in the countryside the common house fly stays away from entering there. Maybe (?) it has something to do with the sound frequency black soldier flies generate that house flies react to with aversion – the black soldier fly can’t bite them.
As for size: it is their larvae which has been commercialized for use and not the adult flies. The larvae are content to stay where they’ve been supplied food until end of their larval life cycle, then they stop eating and will attempt to find suitable pupation site.
Sara – Black Soldier Flies are relatively large flies, about 2/3rds of an inch long, more easy to contain than House Flies or the like (but they are also very annoying when they get into your home). The large size allows them to outcompete smaller flies for resources. The larvae breed in rotting vegetation (you can commonly find them or a related species around compost bins, so they are already part of the wild). The mature grubs crawl out of the muck to pupate and that is how the commercial producers harvest them – as full grown larvae that have purged their guts in preparation for pupation. Apparently the mature grubs are edible, but commercial production is not aimed at the human dinner table (although there are kits for growing them at home).
Some insects are acceptable and even highly desired foods in many cultures, especially Asian and African, but pretty much everywhere in the world some insects are considered good tucker except in the West. Usually the insects are relatively large or occur in great numbers that are easily collected. We eat honey, which is nectar that has been regurgitated by honeybees, and most have no problem with prawns, shrimp, crayfish and the like – which are basically aquatic grasshoppers – so the Western bias against insects as food is a little strange.
I sincerely doubt that Black Soldier Fly production could be scaled up to produce enough protein to replace our preferred animal sources. At the moment they are mainly used to feed exotic pets, poultry and fish. It is sort of neat that you can turn manure and rotting vegetation into chicken feed, presumably economically, but breaking down all that vegetation produces a lot of carbon dioxide. I wonder why the article didn’t mention that?
you can use earthworms to process plant material nad manure and theirm castings, liquids from bedding and the worms are all useable for animal feed or for growijng more food for humans.
reckon that gets my nod over this idiotic idea
Black soldier fly larvae also are able to process manure and waste plant material as well as waste non-human flesh. You can internet search out various research on these larvae utilizing different kinds of manure. You can also internet search out various research on these larvae as an ingredient for different kinds of non-human feed. Earthworm rearing and black soldier fly larvae are different set-ups.
Not sure I understand. The maggots can be fed on refuse but are being fed grain. If the maggots are being raised to feed other animals, why not feed the animals the grain directly? Most animals can synthesize proteins from grains.
But, maggot rights matter.
Between abundant rainfall and high CO2 my lawn is growing like crazy. Now if we could just find a type of grass that’s edible for humans we could feed lots of people. And I would prefer that over maggot burgers.
In the dark corners of Youtube you will probably find people doing something rather more advanced than that…
Whatever, why do these people have such an obsession with eating insects for protein? Yeast and many plants can produce proteins more efficiently and rather more pleasant to eat, in my opinion.
Easily the funniest comments ever on a WUWT post. Thanks for sharing this “interesting” story!!
Isolate the proteins, and remove the slime. It might be more interesting. Now find some yummy fat. Moths? My cats have always enjoyed a fat moth every now and then. Gruburgers? Fry-em up! Give me enough beer and I might have a go. Toss up whether the hurling that follows is due to the gruburger or the quantity of beer required to make me stupid enough to eat the gruburger.
Ha! So typical: A radical fix to a problem that is already well on the way to being fixed.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/prevalence-of-undernourishment?time=1991..2017
Source: https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment
Sorry guys! I just ain’t hungry enough yet!
Texan here: we’ll deep fry d–n near anything. And we like protein. It’s not bacon OR burgers, it’s bacon burgers.
I’m wondering what these suckers are like pan-fried with ham and eggs and some toast.
Silly marketers. Don’t try to see gross stuff to people on climate grounds. Find some good recipes and sell it THAT way.
It has to be asked .. so when will we reach peak maggot?
Population will not hit 11 billion. It may not get to 9.
“Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline” (2019) by Darrell Bricker & John Ibbitson
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1984823213/
For half a century, statisticians, pundits, and politicians have warned that a burgeoning population will soon overwhelm the earth’s resources. But a growing number of experts are sounding a different alarm. Rather than continuing to increase exponentially, they argue, the global population is headed for a steep decline—and in many countries, that decline has already begun.
Sounds more promising than the Beyond Meat IPO.
As maggots areiving creatures presumably vega s and vegetarians can’t eat maggot derived protein?
Grinded maggots are no longer living creatures so vega s and vegetarians could eat maggot derived protein.
OTOH vegans always need dietary supplements, with or without maggots.
Useless fantastic claims that make gross assumptions while failing to fill in critical details.
A) They are raising their fly larvae indoors, year round.
* i) Their comparison to soybeans uses some unknown yield per acre for a season’s crop.
* ii) No mention is made of feed quality, feed return ratios, costs of maintaining indoor environment.
* iii) Chickens, turkeys, aquaculture and as others have mentioned, hogs and pigs can be raised under controlled indoor environments and produce high levels of a much tastier protein. A number of meat chickens are harvested at 4 to 6 weeks on an amazing feed to meat conversion ratio.
* iii) Soybean yields are up to 65 bushels of soybeans per acre. That is substantial in anyone’s book.
What it comes down to is the claimant is making apples to oranges comparisons while using gross assumptions.
An absurd method to making a claim that is extremely similar to an off-topic comment about miracle batteries.
i.e. some yahoo has fantasized what his little room full of flies could accomplish; if only had acres of well maintained buildings filled with flies… Another pipe-dream about getting rich selling a product for which there is little demand beyond feeding lizards and whatnot.
Modern fishing/agriculture can feed the projected population. The issues are distribution and storage, not to mention inept and/or hostile governments. Feed the bugs to the bug-eaters, not me.
Are there enough politicians and bureaucrats to go round?
There are stories of mutinies being caused by sailors being forced to eat maggot-infested meat. Apparently those sailors didn’t know how nutritious those maggots were.
Jim
” A 2011 U.N. report detailed how rotting food emits millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, accounting for about seven per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.”
The flies do not sequester the CO2 long term. They only act as a delay. The CO2 is released when the organism eating the maggots dies, or when the original consumer is eaten by a human that dies.
I suggest that if you feed these maggots plant protein, you will get LESS animal protein, not more.
Why? Read on…
And frankly, for some reason I would prefer to eat a soy-burger vs. a maggot-burger.
I suggest that maggots are more suitable food for the extreme left – keeps it in the family.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_mass
The law of conservation of mass or principle of mass conservation states that for any system closed to all transfers of matter and energy, the mass of the system must remain constant over time, as system’s mass cannot change, so quantity can neither be added nor be removed. Hence, the quantity of mass is conserved over time.
The law implies that mass can neither be created nor destroyed, although it may be rearranged in space, or the entities associated with it may be changed in form. For example, in chemical reactions, the mass of the chemical components before the reaction is equal to the mass of the components after the reaction. Thus, during any chemical reaction and low-energy thermodynamic processes in an isolated system, the total mass of the reactants, or starting materials, must be equal to the mass of the products.
The concept of mass conservation is widely used in many fields such as chemistry, mechanics, and fluid dynamics. Historically, mass conservation was demonstrated in chemical reactions independently by Mikhail Lomonosov and later rediscovered by Antoine Lavoisier in the late 18th century. The formulation of this law was of crucial importance in the progress from alchemy to the modern natural science of chemistry.
The conservation of mass only holds approximately and is considered part of a series of assumptions coming from classical mechanics. The law has to be modified to comply with the laws of quantum mechanics and special relativity under the principle of mass-energy equivalence, which states that energyand mass form one conserved quantity. For very energetic systems the conservation of mass-only is shown not to hold, as is the case in nuclear reactions and particle-antiparticle annihilation in particle physics.
Mass is also not generally conserved in open systems. Such is the case when various forms of energy and matter are allowed into, or out of, the system. However, unless radioactivity or nuclear reactions are involved, the amount of energy escaping (or entering) such systems as heat, mechanical work, or electromagnetic radiation is usually too small to be measured as a decrease (or increase) in the mass of the system.
For systems where large gravitational fields are involved, general relativity has to be taken into account, where mass-energy conservation becomes a more complex concept, subject to different definitions, and neither mass nor energy is as strictly and simply conserved as is the case in special relativity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics
The three laws of thermodynamics define physical quantities (temperature, energy, and entropy) that characterize thermodynamic systems at thermal equilibrium. The laws describe how these quantities behave under various circumstances, and preclude the possibility of certain phenomena (such as perpetual motion).
The three laws of thermodynamics are:[1][2][3][4][5]
First law of thermodynamics: When energy passes, as work, as heat, or with matter, into or out from a system, the system’s internal energy changes in accord with the law of conservation of energy. Equivalently, perpetual motion machines of the first kind (machines that produce work with no energy input) are impossible.
Second law of thermodynamics: In a natural thermodynamic process, the sum of the entropies of the interacting thermodynamic systems increases. Equivalently, perpetual motion machines of the second kind (machines that spontaneously convert thermal energy into mechanical work) are impossible.
Third law of thermodynamics: The entropy of a system approaches a constant value as the temperature approaches absolute zero.[2] With the exception of non-crystalline solids (glasses) the entropy of a system at absolute zero is typically close to zero.
In addition, there is conventionally added a “zeroth law”, which defines thermal equilibrium:
Zeroth law of thermodynamics: If two systems are each in thermal equilibrium with a third system, they are in thermal equilibrium with each other. This law helps define the concept of temperature.
There have been suggestions of additional laws, but none of them achieve the generality of the four accepted laws, and they are not mentioned in standard textbooks.[1][2][3][4][6][7]
The laws of thermodynamics are important fundamental laws in physics and they are applicable in other natural sciences.
Addressing one point only: Larvae are animals, so in a sense they do create animal protein. As larvae grow through their succession on stages their total protein content usually increases; although I believe not immediately pre-pupation.
>>
Second law of thermodynamics: In a natural thermodynamic process, the sum of the entropies of the interacting thermodynamic systems increases.
<<
The Second Law also only applies to isolated systems. A closed system may lose heat and by extension, entropy. If a closed system had to obey the Second Law, then it could never cool down. When a warmer system transfers heat to a cooler system (both closed systems), the entropy lost by the warmer system is less than the entropy gained by the cooler system. The combination of the two closed systems could define an isolated system–in which case the total entropy must increase if they aren’t in equilibrium.
Jim
Ahh, no. Cheap energy production and modern agriculture are the answer.
Many years ago, possibly the 1970 tees, there was a powder produced by
some similar process, either plant or insect based, which the UN said was to
be distributed to the starving of I think Africa, and which added to what was
in the cooking pot took on the flavour of that food.
Sounds good, so did it solve e the problem.
Well the population of the so called undeveloped world has increased by a considerable amount, so yes it did work. Snag was they did not also supply a contraceptive along with it.
The nasty truth is that if they do not die, they live and they breed.
MJE VK5ELL
While preparing a college paper in the early 1970s, I did some research into alternative ways to “feed the world.” One of the things I retained from my readings was that soy was considered “poverty food” by the undeveloped part of the world. It tasted nasty and they refused to eat it when the West sent it to poverty-stricken people. In ancient China, soy was valued for its function as a nitrogen fixer (a/k/a “green manure”). I understand that Buddhist monks used it to reduce their natural urges (if you know what I mean–I’m not sure what words I am allowed to use here). Fermented soy products were commonly used as condiments.
Western food manufacturers figured out that they would have to work on making it taste good before it could be used for a significant food source–even for poverty-stricken people.
Since then, of course, they have done lots of work to make soy palatable. They also frame it as a “health food” so people will pay more for it and tolerate the weird things it does to their body. The estrogen-like substances it contains are touted as a “feature” instead of a “bug”. However, it retains its goitrogenic tendency. I have read of and seen people make themselves clinically hypothyroid by using it to excess.
I know this thread is about using insects/worms for human feed, but I saw mention of soy and wanted to put my oar in. I could go on about how most soy is GMO and Roundup-ready (compatible for use with Glyphosate), which threatens the health of our microbiome, but I’ll stop now.
Western food manufacturers figured out that they would have to work on making it taste good before it could be used for a significant food source–even for poverty-stricken people.
>>
TOFU!
Please explain!
This is a master-class in marketing … “I can’t believe it’s not cheese!”
I can’t believe it’s food.
MJE, they also octroyd contraception in the third world – in the 70s one could read / hear about women dying on Copper poisoning contraceptive spirals implanted without explanation during “health precautionary examinations.”
And in situ for years in the females.
Has PETA been alerted?
I’ve eaten a few bugs in my lifetime, some intentionally and some by accident. This of course not counting the allowable levels of insects and insect parts that the US government says are OK to be found in various processed food products.
That said, I wouldn’t have any issue with these maggots being used for animal feed, even for pet foods (as the ancestors of dogs and cats surely ate bugs and many cats and dogs still do eat bugs). They might also be OK as snack foods (thought I doubt they will ever be as commonly found as potato chips!). However,bugs IMO are no replacement for most main meal meats. Firing up the grill to cook some maggot burgers just isn’t the same as cooking burgers of beef or other ground animal meat.