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How Does Insect Farming Work?

Insect farming involves breeding, rearing and harvesting insects for animal feed, human consumption, pharmaceutical and cosmetic uses. Commonly farmed insects include crickets, mealworms, and the black soldier fly.

In particular, insect farming has huge potential for animal feed, providing a higher-quality, protein-rich substitute for existing, unsustainable wild catch fish protein. For instance, fish meal can be replaced by meal made from fly larvae as they both have similar amino acid composition.

Insects can also be used for medicinal purposes as well. A giant cockroach farm in Sichuan, China breeds and harvests cockroaches in a sterile environment to create an oral medicine that has been found to cure stomach pain and speed up healing for burns.

Insects are also bred and sold for human consumption. Entomophagy, namely the practice of eating insects, has been around throughout our evolutionary history. In modern times, however, some insects have also been touted as a superfood. For example, crickets are ground up into pasta or used to make protein powder, marketed as a nutritional supplement that elevates the quality of food. In some countries, harvested bugs are also sun-dried or freeze-dried.

Is Insect Farming Sustainable?

Insect farming is incredibly sustainable by virtue of its low ecological footprint, accessible nature and high nutritive value. It is widely acknowledged that insects require fewer resources, including land and water, to farm and are able to convert low-quality organic waste into protein-rich end products suitable for animal or human consumption.

Insect farming produces significantly less carbon dioxide and the insects contain a good amount of minerals and vitamins. Ynsect claims their new factory will grow insect protein with negative emissions. The UN has even promoted insects as a key future sustainable food source.

In light of climate change, pressing food security issues and a looming environmental crisis, insect farming looks to be a hugely viable – and sustainable – solution, albeit one that requires substantial capital investment to get started.

What are the Benefits of Farming Insects Over Traditional Livestock?

Insect farming is preferable to traditional livestock farming due to its higher feed conversion ratio. According to the UN, “crickets need six times less feed than cattle, four times less than sheep, and twice less than pigs and broiler chickens to produce the same amount of protein.”

Black soldier flies are also well-known for having a much more efficient feed conversion rate. In fact, 10 kilograms of feed are needed to produce one kilogram of beef. In comparison, only 1.5 kilograms of feed is required to produce one kilogram of black soldier fly larvae, making the process over six times more efficient.

Furthermore, traditional livestock practices are much more difficult to scale up: on average, cows produce a single calf every 400 days, whereas black soldier flies can lay up to 500 eggs at a time. The high reproduction rate and shorter life cycle of insects mean that insect farming firms can rapidly accelerate production as needed to meet demand.

From an animal welfare perspective, insect farming also induces far less stress on the livestock, since insects, by nature, tend to prefer small, dark spaces. Hence, the amount of induced animal stress is negligible, in comparison to traditional livestock.

Wrapping Up

Insect agriculture, while unorthodox, has the potential to be a huge growth industry, producing sustainable protein. However, it still has a myriad of challenges to confront. While plant-based meat companies such as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat are expanding at an impressive rate, insect farming investors are grappling with scaling up. Agritech companies need to make use of robotics, IoT and cloud-based software together with AI algorithms in order to streamline processes, cut operating costs, and attain commercial success.

The industry also has to overcome Western stigma – insects are often characterised as unhygienic, unfamiliar, and unappetizing. However, as startups come up with new and innovative ways to integrate insects into more familiar packages, such as granola bars, cricket flour, and protein powder, the industry has a real chance of changing the food industry as we know it.

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Honeybees

Commodities harvested from honeybees include beeswax, bee bread, bee pollen, propolis, royal jelly, brood, and honey. All of the aforementioned are mostly used in food, however, being wax, beeswax has many other uses, such as being used in candles, and propolis may be used as a wood finish. However, the presence of honeybees can negatively affect abundance and diversity of wild bees, with consequences for pollination of crops.

Lac insects

Lac insects secrete a resinous substance called lac. Lac is used in many applications, from its use in food to being used as a colorant or as a wood finish. The majority of lac farming takes place in India and Thailand, with over 2 million residential employees.

Cochineal

Made into a red dye known as carmine, cochineal are incorporated into many products, including cosmetics, food, paint, and fabric. About 100,000 insects are needed to make a single kilogram of dye. The shade of red the dye yields depends on how the insect is processed. France is the world's largest importer of carmine.

Crickets


Cricket Shelter Modular Edible Insect Farm, designed by Terreform ONE

Among the hundreds of different types of crickets, the house cricket (Acheta domesticus) is the most common type used for human consumption. The cricket is one of the most nutritious edible insects, and in many parts of the world, crickets are consumed dry-roasted, baked, deep-fried, and boiled. Cricket consumption may take the form of cricket flour, a powder of dried and ground crickets, which is easily integrated into many food recipes. Crickets are commonly farmed for non-human animal food, as they provide much nutrition to the many species of reptiles, fish, birds, and other mammals that consume them. Crickets are normally killed by deep freezing, where they feel no pain and are sedated before neurological death.

Waxworms

Waxworms are the larvae of wax moths. These caterpillars are used widely across the world for food, fish bait, animal testing, and plastic degradation. Low in protein but high in fat content, they are a valuable source of fat for many insectivorous organisms. Waxworms are popular in many parts of the world, due to their ability to live in low temperatures and their simplicity in production.

Cockroaches

Further information: Cockroach farming

Cockroaches are farmed by the million in China, where they are used in traditional medicine and in cosmetics. The main species farmed is the American cockroach (Periplaneta americana). The cockroaches are reared on food such as potato and pumpkin peeling waste from restaurants, then scooped or vacuumed from their nests, killed in boiling water, and dried in the sun.

As feed and food

Main articles: insects as feed and insects as food

Insects show promise as animal feed. For instance, fly larvae can replace fish meal due to the similar amino acid composition. It is possible to formulate fish meal to increase unsaturated fatty acid. Wild birds and free-range poultry can consume insects in the adult, larval and pupal forms naturally. Grasshoppers and moths, as well as houseflies, have been used as feed supplements for poultry. Apart from that, insects have potential as feed for reptiles, soft monkey as well as birds.

Hundreds of species of crickets, grasshoppers, beetles, moths and various other insects are considered edible. Selected species are farmed for human consumption. Humans have been eating insects for as long as (according to some sources) 30,000 years. Today insects are becoming increasingly viable as a source of sustainably produced protein, as conventional meat forms are very land-intensive and produce large quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas. Insects bred in captivity offer a low space-intensive, highly feed-efficient, relatively pollution-free, high-protein source of food for both humans and non-human animals. Insects have a high nutritional value, dense protein content and micronutrient and probiotic potential. Insects such as crickets and mealworms have high concentrations of complete protein, vitamin B12, riboflavin and vitamin A.[4] Insects offer an economical solution to increasingly pressing food security and environmental issues concerning the production and distribution of protein to feed a growing world population.

Benefits

Purported benefits of the use of insects as food include:

  • Significantly lower amounts of resource and space use, lower amounts of waste produced, and emissions of very trace amounts of greenhouse gases.

  • They include many vitamins and essential minerals, contain dietary fiber (which is not present in meat), and are a complete protein. The protein count of 100 g of cricket is nearly equivalent to the amount in 100 g of lean ground beef.

  • As opposed to meat, lower costs are required to care for and produce insects.

  • Faster growth and reproduction rates. Crickets mature rather quickly and are typically full-grown within 3 weeks to a month, and an individual female can lay from 1,200 to 1,500 eggs in three to four weeks. Cattle, however, become adults at 2 years, and the breeding ratio is four breeding animals for each market animal produced.

  • Unlike meat, insects rarely transmit diseases such as H1N1, mad cow disease, or salmonella.

Reduced feed

Cattle use 12 times the amount of feed that crickets do to produce an equal amount of protein. Crickets also only use a quarter of the feed of sheep and one-half the amount of feed given to swine and chicken to produce an equivalent amount of protein. Crickets require only two pounds of feed to produce one pound of the finished product. Much of this efficiency is a result of crickets being ectothermic, as in they get their heat from the environment instead of having to expend energy to create their own body heat as typical mammals do.

Nutrient efficiency

Insects are nutrient-efficient compared to other meat sources. The insect protein content is comparable to most meat products. Likewise, the fatty acid composition of edible insects is comparable to fish lipids, with high levels of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs). In addition, all parts of edible insects are efficiently used whereas some parts of conventional livestock are not directly available for human consumption. The nutritional contents of insects vary with species as well as within species, depending on their metamorphic stage, habitat, and diet. For instance, the lipid composition of insects is largely dependent on their diet and metamorphic stage. Insects are abundant in other nutrients. Locusts, for example, contain between 8 and 20 mg of iron in every 100 grams of raw locust. Beef, on the other hand, contains roughly 6 mg of iron in the same amount of meat. Crickets are also very nutrient-efficient. For every 100 grams of the substance, crickets contain 12.9 grams of protein, 121 calories, and 5.5 grams of fat. Beef contains more protein, with 23.5 grams in 100 grams of the substance, but also has roughly three times the calories and four times the amount of fat as crickets do in 100 grams. Therefore, per 100 grams of the substance, crickets contain only half the nutrients of beef, except for iron. High levels of iron are implicated in bowel cancer and heart disease. When considering the protein transition, cold-blooded insects can convert food more efficiently: crickets only need 2.1 kg feed for 1 kg ‘meat’, while poultry and cows need more than 2 times and 12 times of the feed, respectively.

Greenhouse gas emissions

The raising of livestock is responsible for 18% of all greenhouse gases emitted. Alternative sources of protein, such as insects, replace protein sourced from livestock and help decrease the number of greenhouse gases emitted from food production. Insects produce less carbon dioxide, ammonia, and methane than livestock such as pigs and cattle, with no farmed insect species besides cockroaches releasing methane at all.

Land usage

Livestock raising accounts for 70% of agricultural land use. This results in a land-cover change that destroys local ecosystems and displaces people and wildlife. Insect farming is minimally space-intensive compared to other conventional livestock, and can even take place in populated urban centers.

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