Feed – Insects
Take off for fly feed With the opening in France of the world’s largest insect farm, could 2020 be the tipping point for this alternative protein in aquaculture markets? BY SANDY NEIL
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HE world’s largest insect farm and US agricultural feed giant Cargill are joining forces to take a bite out of a new multi-billion dollar market to replace fishmeal in salmon and trout feed. Their solution: the black soldier fly, whose voracious larvae are highly efficient at producing protein and compost. But while insect meal helps reduce the dependence on wild caught fish, will it catch on with fish farmers and consumers? More than half of the fish consumed worldwide comes from aquaculture, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), a figure expected to grow by 60 per cent by 2030. A major challenge for breeding carnivorous fish is the availability of protein and lipid resources adapted to their nutritional needs. The FAO estimates the global demand for quality protein to be worth 500 billion dollars, including an emerging market for proteins derived from insects worth a potential 30 to 50 billion dollars. Since July 1, 2018, the European Union has authorised aquaculture farms to feed their fish proteins derived from insect larvae. Now Cargill and InnovaFeed, a French biotech start-up building the world’s largest insect farm, are trying to convert Europe’s fish farms to insect feed.
‘With a population that is growing exponentially and finite resources on our planet, Cargill’s mission is to nourish the world in a safe, responsible and sustainable way,’ Megan Fairchild Anderson, Cargill Aqua Nutrition’s global marketing communications lead, told Fish Farmer. ‘With that perspective, Cargill is proactively looking for alternative feed ingredients and new proteins. ‘Traditionally, a lot of aquaculture feeds were based on fishmeal and oil derived from wild fish which were not commonly eaten directly by humans. ‘But today the feeds have developed to use many terrestrial sources of protein and energy, and there is also now a lot of work to develop novel sources as well. ‘Cargill is investing in some of these directly and also working with other suppliers to encourage them to develop alternative sustainable sources of nutrients, so we can grow the sustainably sourced raw material basket to help feed the aquaculture industry. Today, fishmeal is about 10 per cent of the diet.’ Cargill, a huge 150-year-old firm with 160,000 employees across 70 countries, is promoting alternative ingredients such as single-cell protein feed pioneered by two firms, Calysta and White Dog Labs, and ‘promising’ insect protein. ‘It has two major advantages,’ Anderson said: ‘First, insects are part of many fish species’ natural diet, and second, it can be produced in a sustainable way at a competitive cost using widely available co-products of the cereal industry. ‘Currently, the main market for insect protein is aquaculture. The total fish feed market is estimated at 50 million tonnes per year today, and is growing six to eight per cent annually. ‘The global aquaculture market is still experiencing high growth and we will need alternative sources of protein to support sustainable growth. The market for insect meal can therefore be very large.’
It can be “produced in
a sustainable way at a competitive cost using widely available coproducts of the cereal industry
”
Larger volumes She added: ‘The insect industry is at an inflection point. We will see much larger volumes available as soon as [this] year. InnovaFeed has spent the past years developing an innovative and competi-
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13/01/2020 15:53:13