It will also require more meat and bugs grow faster. One of the main ingredients of chicken feed is soybeans, which are extremely cheap and widely used all over the world. If insect farmers want to start replacing cheap commodity crops like soybeans, they will need to find ways to reduce costs.
That’s where insect geneticists like Picard come in. “There is not enough output right now,” she said. Tuure Parviainen, CEO of Finnish insect farming startup Volare, agrees. “The demand is there, but the production needs to be done on a fairly large scale for the big manufacturers to really start making products,” he said. The same is true for pet food as it is for poultry: The volume is so great that the major producers are unwilling to invest in insects. “The supply isn’t really there so they can flip the switch and change the ingredients,” Parviainen said.
One way to grow is to ensure that insect farms are as productive as possible. Scotland-based startup Beta Bugs runs breeding programs to develop more efficient versions of the black soldier fly — one of the most commonly farmed insects. “What we have is a raw material that can be improved through selection,” said CEO Thomas Farrugia. “I think people are starting to realize more and more that this is how we make the industry scale over time.”
Fortunately for insect breeders like Farrugia, time is on their side. Although it may have taken humans thousands of years of crossbreeding to create modern cow breeds, insects have a much shorter life span. A black soldier fly is ready to be harvested about 14 days after hatching. Its entire life cycle can take about six weeks. “This means you can cram a lot of selective varieties in a year,” says Farrugia. According to Farrugia, the trick to breeding a better beetle is to balance the different traits together. You may have one type of bug that produces a lot of skinny larvae or another that produces a smaller number of fatter chicks. As the larvae mature, the nutrients inside them change as well, so one of the breeding tricks is to hit the sweet spot between the fat, succulent bugs and those at the right stage in the life cycle. their life.
That said, they don’t want adult insects too quickly, because insects are transported to insect farms while they are still in their infancy, to ensure that they are fresh when they arrive. Beta Bugs keeps its black soldier flies in a facility just outside of Edinburgh. From there, the eggs are packaged and sent across the EU. Choosing the right courier is key, says Farrugia. Black soldier fly eggs hatch in about four days, so if a package is delayed, the customer may have to deliver a little more. survive than they expected.
In France, the nsect launched a breeding program to study the genetics of Tenebrio molitor, beetles. Company cooperated already with France’s national genome sequencing center, Genoscope, to sequence the mealworm genome and also identified a lineage of buffalo worms, a close relative of the mealworm, that grows 25% faster compared to the original line.
