Insect Farming - Turning Food Waste into Gold (i.e. OIL)
Here’s an exciting new solution that I’d like to share on about how wasted food or plant matter can be turned into gold (sort of)! It’s related to insect farming, and I also talk on how electronics and IoT sensors plays into this.
TLDR;
Food waste is a significant issue that should concern everyone.
Insect farming, particularly the Black Soldier Fly species, can convert food waste into usable products like oil or protein feed for chickens, fish, pets, etc. The value comes in how they evolved to grow in decomposing food, and thus are more biologically adapted to and thrive in such environments. This can be exploited to handle a different range of food waste, that traditional composting is unable to handle. Why this particular species? They are safe, harmless and non-invasive flies.
Sensors, machine learning, and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies can potentially be implemented to scale operations. Not just insect farming, any kind of farming.
Globally an issue pertinent to every single nation and person, is the issue of food wastage. An constant inefficiency in our supply chain, where mismanagement of the waste has it’s own range of issues, in the form of pollution or emissions. The main focus for developing societies of the past and current was targeting an abundance and surplus in food security, focusing on increasing and scaling production. Today we have new constraints, and an increasing focus is optimization across the entire supply chain and targeting a circular economy - essentially what if food waste could be eliminated entirely?
Food waste is not just the leftover portions by someone who over-ordered. It’s also includes the inevitable byproducts of cooking - peels, chopped ends, etc, which is especially more prevalent in mass-cooking processes. As well slightly spoilt food unsold and discarded in supermarkets is a significant issue. Unmanaged food waste is also a major source of environmental contamination with many different animals scavenging through plastic bags for food scraps ingesting small amounts of plastic in the process. Rotting food grows mould and fungus and can spread in the environment through the waste if unmonitored (which is quite common in certain places.) I think I don’t need to share anymore on why this is a major issue that should concern everyone.
Composting was the hailed solution, but nature presents us with an alternative option in insect farming, tackling the areas where composting falls short. Composting works best with only certain types of food waste, and in other cases fertilizers or manure produced can actually be harmful to the plants. Farming insects by feeding them the food waste presents a new range of food waste that can be handled, turning the food waste into useful products.
Flies, particularly the Black Soldier Fly (BSF) evolved and adapted themselves to grow in decomposing bio-matter in nature. The flies start from a larvae caterpillar like stage, consuming a lot of food in this growing stage, and form a cocoon eventually emerging out as a fly. In BSF larvae (BSFL) farming, the larvae are fed food waste (that they are happy to eat), and before they turn into flies, the cocoons and shedding are converted into another product - either protein powders that can be fed to animals like chickens, fish, etc, or oil that can be extracted from them for a variety of purposes. These insects are harmless too, already naturally found in many ecosystems, non-biting and non-invasive. Some larvae from each stage are preserved to grow into flies, mate and lay eggs (one fly can lay up to 900 eggs) starting the next stage.
In the future I envision one can study the genetic makeup of these insects to try and create artificial digestion processes to rapidly convert food waste into biomass and protein, but till then insect farming provides a promising solution to handle a growing issue of food waste.
There are some constraints in the kind of waste that can be fed to the insects. If you thought you can just give them your trash and they’ll eat through the food amongst mixed plastic, well they don’t like to eat it anymore than you like to look at such trash. Thus to handle food waste pre-sorting and preventing plastic contamination is essential. For now it is best suited for mass production processes where there is one homogenous type of food waste. In city scaping, plant and tree clippings are a large amount of biomatter that is constantly generated as well, and currently is either unmanaged or left in landfills or burnt. Possibly in the future sorting mechanisms and enforcing waste disposal practices can help handle any kind of general mixed waste. Other challenges include preventing mould from taking over their farms. All in all, an area with growing research and interest.
I was especially intrigued by this, as it is taking food waste - old and rotting scraps that deter most that normally ends up in landfills or is burnt (leading to emissions) and converting it into a usable product like oil. As people once said, oil is the new gold, hence that had been my introduction. Oil can be used as a form of energy storage, can power generators to create electricity, and biofuels as jet-engine fuels are also being explored into. Overall, presenting a solution for a sustainable circular economy.
The picture is of me presenting a tech solution on stage at a university hackathon, upgrading insect farms with sensors and machine learning to automate and scale processes, but unfortunately as the whole industry is still at an early stage the tech solution was not deemed viable. Though it holds potential, and similar technologies can be applied to any kind of farming.
We had successfully built a working prototype of a smart automated insect farm - automating the feeding schedule, monitoring temperature, humidity, automatically adjusting air flow, and also tracking the progress and health of the farm - notifying when the farm is ready for harvesting.
As well we had ideated on an ML/Computer Vision powered dashboard to help track the status of multiple farms.
From my project experiences I have knowledge on how to build such a dashboard and connect it to sensors (and mobile notifications too! if a certain anomaly occurs.) If anyone is interested in learning more about such IoT solutions feel free to consult me. Sensor costs in the industry are rapidly coming down and can increasingly be adopted!
My good friend Vasanth had won and secured 20,000$ in seed funding for his insect farm startup BUGBOOM, tackling corporate food waste in Singapore.
Some other startups/companies/farmers that I am aware of that are working on it:
https://entomal.com/ (MALAYSIA)
https://www.kovaibsf.com/ (INDIA)
https://www.entobel.com/ (VIETNAM)
If you have any questions or doubts after reading about this, do feel free to discuss with me so I may refine this article.
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