Black soldier fly larvae have incredible potential to serve humans
The purpose of this blog is to expose people to the surprising facts about this beneficial arthropod. A good place to start is the fact that black soldier flies (BSF) are not disease carrying pests like house flies. I’ll address that issue in detail later…
Sustainability
If we want future generations to inherit a healthy planet then there is no alternative but to embrace sustainable technologies. Black soldier flies have the potential to transform the way we process organic wastes. These beneficial insects represent an elegant solution to a nasty problem.
Black soldier fly larvae want your garbage
I think we should let them have it. According to the EPA over 12% of the garbage buried in landfill is wasted and spoiled food. Recycling can be used to recapture most types of waste, but how do you recycle old pizza? Food waste didn’t even make it onto the EPA’s recycling graph:
Traditional composting works well with yard waste, but it isn’t practical on a municipal scale for food waste, and it can’t be used for meat and dairy products. We could feed all types of food waste to black soldier fly larvae and they would reduce it’s volume by up to 95%. The compost that is the byproduct of their digestion makes a super medium for raising earthworms, which in turn produce an even higher quality compost. Using BSF larvae this way could mean the end of food waste slowly decomposing in landfills. Combining BSF composting with vermicomposting (earthworms) results in the most efficient processing of putrescent organic waste available to us.
What was once garbage becomes black soldier fly larvae
If we use black soldier flies to process food waste we’re actually converting the waste into black soldier fly larvae, and that’s a very good thing. Meal made from dried BSF larvae is similar to fish meal in nutrients and has been successfully tested as feed for poultry, livestock and commercially raised fish. Black soldier fly technology turns a stream of waste into a stream of nutritious animal feed. This is the essence of sustainability.
On the residential level
Since I started keeping a colony of BSFL there is no such thing as wasted food in my life. If something ceases to be food for me it just becomes food for my colony. With the exception of bones and eggshells, all food scraps go into the BSFL colony, and even a fairly small colony can process a lot of food. A 60cm/2 foot diameter bio-converter can hold enough larvae to process approximately 5 pounds (2.2kg) of table scraps every day. It’s consumed so quickly that it doesn’t have time to decompose to the point where it smells bad. I tested this by adding a whole fish to my colony on a hot day and the odor was not even noticeable a few feet from the composting unit. Keeping a BSF larvae colony is not a brave or a hard thing to do, it’s simple, fascinating and enjoyable.
Teach your children well
One of the best things we can teach our children is to respect their environment. Dumping a steady stream of waste into plastic bags and forwarding it to some unknown place to slowly rot doesn’t teach respect or responsibility. Keeping a black soldier fly colony will give kids a great perspective of nature and the cycle of life. This is especially true if you live in an urban or suburban area where natural cycles aren’t always so obvious.
For more black soldier fly information
Just check out the links on the right side column. Thanks for visiting my blog, I hope you find this new technology as fascinating as I do.
Jerry
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