- Insider went contained in the world’s largest fly farm harvesting larvae as a sustainable protein supply.
- Insect protein is changing into more and more well-liked in animal feed, changing soya or fishmeal.
- Protix operates from a high-tech farm within the Netherlands, with plans to scale to 10 new places.
- For more stories visit Business Insider.
An insect farm might conjure images of fields, barns, and muddy boots, not a fully automated, high-tech facility in a commercial warehouse on an industrial estate.
Only the name, “Protix,” gives away the nature of this facility in the town of Bergen op Zoom in the south of the Netherlands, where the insect company has operated since 2019.
This 15,000-square-metre warehouse is the world’s largest black soldier fly farm. Demand for edible insects — and facilities like these — is on the rise.
At the moment, around 80% of Protix’s production is used for pet food, with the rest used for aquafeed and poultry feed.
This is set to change as fish, poultry, and pig farmers seek alternative sources of protein to fishmeal and soy. Insect protein in poultry and pig feed was approved last year by the EU, which also greenlighted house cricket, yellow mealworm, and migratory locusts for human consumption.
Protix is preparing to announce 10 new locations as it expands in Europe and North America.
Its facilities are the culmination of a decade of intense R&D and the conviction that insect protein could improve the environmental footprint of our food.
This plant has produced 15,000 tonnes of live larvae per year for the last two years; that’s 10,000 tonnes of protein per hectare per year. Soy, in comparison, produces just one tonne of protein per hectare per year.
That is half nature, half nurture. Nature offered the black soldier fly, a champion bio converter. Protix has nurtured the know-how to farm it, which it has spent a decade perfecting.
The very first thing you discover as you stroll in — and the one giveaway that this facility is certainly a farm — is the odor that comes from the bugs’ feed, which jogged my memory of the odour of a hamster cage.
The plant is cut up into sections that take care of completely different phases of the method, however its beating coronary heart is the vertical farm.
That is the place the larvae stay, in crates stacked nearly 4 meters excessive and greater than 16 meters deep in devoted storage models. The temperature is saved at a balmy 30-degrees Celsius.
There are three such storage areas, organized round a central conveyor system the place feeding and harvesting are executed. Technicians management each step of the method by a central console. All the pieces right here is bespoke, from the form of the crate to the proprietary software program.
“You possibly can’t purchase something off the shelf,” Kees Aarts, Protix’s founder and CEO, instructed me as we toured the ability.
The larvae are fed by-products from the food and drinks trade, reminiscent of potato waste from a French fry manufacturing unit or waste grain.
Feed elements are delivered each day and saved in silos behind the plant. They’re then blended and became a particular puree in large mixers.
The larvae are fed each couple of days: The stacker crane pulls out total columns of crates, that are despatched around the conveyor system to be crammed with feed after which taken again to the vertical storage space.
Larvae are harvested in simply six to eight days. One p.c of the larvae are left to pupate into grownup flies and used for breeding, which is finished in a particular chamber, out of bounds to guests.
For harvesting, crates are introduced again to the central conveyor system and tipped into a large sieve, the place the larvae are separated from the leftover feed earlier than being washed.
The larvae are then despatched to be processed in an adjoining room. Protix’s principal merchandise are a protein meal and an oil, which should be separated by a centrifuge. The protein is then packaged into bulk baggage and the oil in container tanks.
“It is like having the seed firm, the farmer, the miller, and the packaging firm all beneath one roof to supply a protein meal,” Aarts stated.
