Food & Climate
On the world’s biggest bug farm, roughly 10 billion maggots squirm toward the day they’ll be crushed, dried and sold as an alternative form of protein powder.
None of these insects will find their way into your smoothie. They’re marketed as a more sustainable ingredient for fish feed, livestock feed and pet food. Along the way, they are tasked with eating food waste — helping to address a source responsible for a tenth of human-induced global greenhouse emissions.
In nature, black soldier fly larvae are gifted recyclers, gorging themselves on dead and decaying plants and animals, neutralizing germs and turning rot into a source of protein that nourishes fish, birds and other creatures.
Adult black soldier flies evolved to look like wasps to scare off predators. But these bugs don’t bite or sting, according to a report seen by “Food & Climate” platform.
The French start-up Innovafeed wants the fly larvae to do the same for human society on an industrial scale, clearing out thousands of tons of food waste and turning it into animal feed on ultraefficient, mechanized farms.
The bug farm could serve as a model for a future industry that blends eons of insect evolution with high-tech robot monitoring to help lower carbon emissions and limit the environmental damage from our food system.
But eight years after rearing its first flies, Innovafeed has yet to make a profit, and some of its most prominent competitors have filed for bankruptcy. The industry’s future depends on finding buyers willing to pay a premium for a more sustainable source of protein — and winning over regulators, who have been slow to legalize feeding insects to fish and animals.
Growth stages in the world’s biggest bug farm
The bugs begin their lives in massive hatcheries, where millions of adult flies meet to mate, lay eggs and, after a 12-day orgy, die.
Small insect farms are fairly common in Asia, Africa and Latin America. But the bug farm in France is next level.
The original hatchery, set up in a greenhouse, holds 60 million flies — nearly the human population of France, the bug farmers point out. A second indoor hatchery holds 300 million, closer to the human population of the United States.
After 12 days, most of the flies have used up their fat reserves, and their corpses blanket the floor. Any survivors fall victim to a fly trap — an industrial version of the one you might have in your home — that lures survivors with bright lights and zaps them. Then human handlers enter for the first time to collect the eggs, sweep out the dead flies and bring in a new batch of breeding adults.
In the biggest area of the bug farm, a machine sprinkles insect eggs into plastic trays along with all the food they’ll need to fuel the first stage of their growth as larvae.
Black soldier fly larvae feed on dead animals, decaying plants and feces in the wild. Because they have such a rancid diet, they’ve developed broad immunity to diseases, producing proteins called peptides that fight harmful microbes and encourage the growth of helpful ones.
The crown jewel
“What makes the black soldier fly the crown jewel is that it can eat anything,” said Jeff Tomberlin, a Texas A&M University entomology professor who heads the National Science Foundation Center for Insect Bio manufacturing and Innovation.
Here in Nesle, the bugs eat porridge — a combination of wheat bran and a soupy slurry called stillage produced as by-products from a neighboring grain processing factory that makes starch, sugar and ethanol. A pipeline pumps tons of bran and stillage from the wheat plant to the bug farm every day.
Innovafeed eventually aims to produce more than 10,000 tons of insect protein per year.
The only other thing the larvae need to thrive is heat and humidity, which the bug farm gets in the form of excess heat from a neighboring power plant. Another pipeline brings warm water and steam from the power plant into the bug farm, keeping the inside at a toasty 86 degrees and 70 to 80 percent humidity to imitate the bugs’ native tropical habitat.
Fueling the bugs’ growth with waste from neighboring factories is crucial for lowering the farm’s greenhouse gas emissions and making insects a sustainable source of protein. If Innovafeed trucked in fresh food from far away and burned gas to make heat, it would lose its environmental advantage.
Clément Ray founded Innovafeed in 2016 to create a more sustainable source of feed for farmed fish.
“It’s not a given that insect protein will have a lower carbon footprint than soy protein or fish meal,” said Clément Ray, Innovafeed’s CEO. “It completely depends on the way you farm, where you get your energy from and how you feed the insects.”