With an ever-increasing burden on the food industry and an ever-growing demand for meats such as poultry, the need for alternative animal feed sources is crucial. The total number of chickens worldwide reached >33 billion in 2020. Feeding these birds is frequently supplemented with soy-derived products, often imported and genetically modified with the EU importing ~14 million tons of soybeans annually. Alongside the high carbon footprint of Soybean farming in South America its farming has led to considerable deforestation, land appropriation and disputes, negatively impacting climate change and local people’s lives.

A suggested alternative feed source has been the larvae of the black soldier fly (BSFL) Hermetia illucens, a common, non-disease carrying insect native to the Americas and Asia. Many lab-scale trials have already shown BSFL to be a suitable replacement for soybean as a protein and fat source. With the added benefit that these larvae can be produced/grown using household/industry food waste, this results in a low environmental cost for the feed. However, there has been until now a distinct lack of large-scale experiments using BSFL, and a growing concern that results seen at lab scale will not be sustainable at the scale needed for industrial chicken farming.

In this recent publication, third year SoCoBio student William Edwards conducted experiments using a novel ‘bio-conversion-unit’ to replicate previous BSFL experiments at scale alongside new experiments looking at the microbiome of the BSFL. Their results showed that much of the previous work does hold true at large-scale, as well as new insights, such as a previously un-documented member of the BSFL core microbiome being observed.

Read the publication in full: https://doi.org/10.1002/jsf2.70010