It turns out black soldier flies may be a good food source for farm animals.
You don’t usually think of flies as being something anyone would actually want, but a lab in London is breeding them by the millions.
Black soldier flies may be a good food source for farm animals.
Keiran Whitaker, CEO of the United Kingdom start-up Entocycle, told CBS News, “it is the quickest, cheapest most sustainable insect to farm and it's a non-disease, non-pest species that's found all over the world."
The bugs are packed with protein and they can feed on food waste. Which means they may be more sustainable than a lot of other animal feeds.
“Right now we cut down rainforests to produce soy, we overfish the oceans to catch fishmeal, and then they get turned into protein feed that gets shipped all over the world again to feed the animals, it's incredibly unsustainable,” Whitaker said.
Entocycle is a start-up in the U.K. that wants to bring bug-breeding to farmers around the world. Their machines can count fly eggs fast.
“You can't farm insects if you don't know how many insects you have and so it's really important to have it at that kind of key level when you are managing billions in real time,” Whitaker said.
The larvae are fattened up on food waste, and then packaged into animal feed. It’s being touted as "the livestock feed of the future."
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