This is very good news.
I came to the same conclusion some seven years ago as an obvious feedstock for
chickens. This now establish the
practical parameters missing in my past musings and a major conclusion follows.
All animal and human organic
waste can be processed this way including all slaughter house wastage to
produce maggot crops. These maggot crops
can be cleansed in their final stage with a soy meal based feed to stabilize quality. All in this then produces a huge feedstock
that can then be converted by this method or alternative nutrient saving
methods into feed suitable for fish and chickens and plausibly all farm
animals. This includes pig and chicken
manure and cattle manure also. Our
biggest problem could become a viable revenue source. And a viable fertilizer
source from the droppings.
It is also plausible
that this can be engineered to be farm friendly as well allowing to ship a
finished maggot product to a feed finisher.
From what they are
describing here, they are well along in organizing hardware.
Insect-based fish feed
October
16, 201
Randy
Shore
Long
a vocal critic of B.C.’s conventional fish-farming industry, environmentalist
David Suzuki has helped create a new product being tested as feed for farmed
salmon.
Suzuki
and Brad Marchant, CEO of the Vancouver-based start-up company Enterra, coined
the idea of using maggots fed on food waste to create a sustainable source of
protein while fly fishing in Yukon.
“For
years we’ve been fighting salmon aquaculture, not because we are against
aquaculture, but we felt that [conventional] aquaculture was the wrong way to
do it,” Suzuki told The Vancouver Sun. “First of all, the salmon are grown in
open nets, so you are using the ocean as a sewer. Closed containment is the way
it has to go.”
Suzuki
said he would oppose using the feed in open-net salmon aquaculture.
“I
would not like that at all,” said Suzuki. “I think it should be used, with
vision, in hard containers, but I think that [technology] is coming.”
“I
wouldn’t be happy, but I guess it’s better than fish meal,” he said.
Recent
advances in closed containment fish farming have begun to address some of the
effects of salmon farms on wild salmon, predators and the marine environment,
but feed remains problematic.
Critics,
including Suzuki, complain that the feed used to grow farmed salmon simply
converts one kind of fish — often anchovy from Peru — into another at a huge
cost to the health of wild fisheries.
“I
asked David what else we could feed fish and he said, ‘They eat insects,’”
Marchant said. Suzuki’s fly-fisherman’s insight tickled Marchant’s inner venture
capitalist.
“So
we went looking for an insect system that could convert food waste into food
that we could give to fish and chickens,” Marchant said.
As
co-founder, Suzuki acts as science adviser to Enterra, but donated his shares
in the company to the David Suzuki Foundation.
While
B.C.’s aquaculture industry has made progress in reducing the amount of fish
meal and fish oil in feed, an insect-based system that diverts waste food from
landfill would be a great leap forward, said Jay Ritchlin of the David Suzuki
Foundation.
“This
is brilliant,” said marine biologist Alexandra Morton, a staunch opponent of
conventional open-net fish farming. “It is such a relief when I see something
like this that makes sense.”
“What
makes no sense is to harvest large amounts of fish from the ocean and drag them
the length of the planet to end up with less fish,” said Morton.
Enterra
takes fruit and vegetable waste from grocers and food processors — including
Overwaitea Food Group and Sun Processing — combines it with a small amount of
fish trim and waste bread and feeds it to the larvae of the Black Soldier Fly,
a common insect indigenous to North America.
“It
only takes three hours for them to eat the food, so it never sits around or
rots,” Marchant said. The larvae are fed every few hours and grow to the size
of a small fingertip.
After
two weeks the larvae are cleaned, cooked, dried and ground into meal. The end
products include meal that is about 60 per cent protein and oils, both suitable
for fish or poultry feed. The larvae castings are being tested as fertilizer at
Davonda Nurseries in Langley and organic vegetable producer Amara Farm in
Courtenay.
“We
take traceable, pre-consumer food waste and turn it into a substitute for fish
meal, poultry meal or soy meal — all resource intensive products,” said
Marchant. About 30 per cent of the world’s food is sent to landfill, taking its
nutrients with it, he said.
Every
100 tonnes of food waste yields five tonnes of meal and oil and seven tonnes of
fertilizer. About 80 tonnes of water is removed through evaporation, a process
fuelled in part by heat generated by the larvae themselves.
Feed
products are entering the second phase of testing on salmon by the Department
of Fisheries and Oceans in West Vancouver, while the company waits for
approvals from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
The
company is about to begin construction on a commercial-scale plant in Langley
scheduled to open next year.
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