This article was taken from the September 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
Nine out of ten chickens prefer larvae to fish. "Chicken in the wild look for larvae in animal droppings," says Jason Drew, CEO of AgriProtein, a South African startup founded in 2010. "It's their natural source of protein, yet we keep feeding them fish meal, which is unsustainable and depleting our fish stocks." To help resolve this, AgriProtein makes MagMeal, its chicken feed, from maggots.
The company uses food and abattoir waste to attract its captive flies. After their eggs hatch, the larvae are dried and the resulting protein compressed into pellets. "It's nutrient recycling," says Drew. "We're the first industrial-scale waste-to-protein plant on the planet." AgriProtein's Cape Town factory has 8.5m flies, producing 20 tonnes of larvae every day. It plans to open a factory in Europe in 2015 and start licensing its technology. "I'm an environmentalist and a capitalist," says Drew. "Twenty years ago, you were one or the other. Now, if you aren't both, you'll fail."
- Find fly fuel: In AgriProtein's mega-factory, 110 tonnes of organic waste per day is collected.
This comes from a range of sources, including uneaten catering-industry waste from airlines, restaurants and hotels, as well as offal from abattoirs and animal manure. - Process it: At the factory, the waste is blended into a feed mix for the fly larvae. This waste is pretreated to remove any non-food items such as metal, glass or plastics that have crept in. It is also dried to reduce the water content.
- Breed flies: Within the factory, 300 fly cages are designed to maximise mating. Each cage contains water systems for the flies (ensuring they don't drown).
Temperature, humidity and lighting are also closely controlled to promote their egg-laying. - Time it right: Laying areas in large cages are designed to be attractive to the flies, and they lay all their eggs in one place. All the eggs have to be at exactly the same stage of development before they feed, so the larvae don't kill each other when they hatch.
- Grow flies: As the larvae grow, they will consume all the waste allocated to them by batch. At the end of the growth stage, the larvae are mechanically separated from any waste residue.
- Package: They are then dried, crushed to extract oil (MagOil, rich in fatty acids) and milled into a flaked product for delivery to animal feed mills. This provides the protein element for feeding farmed animals such as chicken, fish and pigs.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
