Feb 10, 2022
Image sourced from Getty Images/ARISA THEPBANCHORNCHAI
Editor’s Note: The following information is derived from an interview Agritecture conducted with Wendy Lu McGill, Interim Executive Director of the North American Coalition for Insect Agriculture (NACIA).
We’re constantly seeing innovation in the urban and controlled environment agriculture industries. Whether it be with LED grow lights glowing all shades of pinkish-purple, the world’s first floating farm for cows, or with farms inventing new ways to be more circular, this industry is transcending boundaries.
With indoor farms already growing the most delicate and challenging of crops, what’s in store for the industry next?
How about insects?
Insects are used as a premium alternative for fishmeal for aquaculture fish; image sourced from Ÿnsect
Demand for animal protein is increasing the strain on the environment. Roughly 80% of the world’s farmland is used to raise and feed livestock, even though animals only account for 18% of global calorie consumption.
With the ever-increasing world population, there is an urgent need for “low-resource solutions to feed humans and other animals using less land and water,” says Wendy Lu McGill, Interim Executive Director of the North American Coalition for Insect Agriculture (NACIA). She adds that “insects are an untapped natural resource with the potential to change our agricultural systems to be more safe and sustainable.”
Even though insect farming is still a niche industry, tons of startups have entered the market.
In AgFunder’s latest edition of its annual Farm Tech Investment Report, Novel Farming Systems was the second best-funded agtech category worldwide last year. Two French startups in the category, which are raising insects for animal and plant nutrition purposes, raised rounds in excess of $100 million: Ÿnsect and InnovaFeed.
These investments make it clear that insect agriculture is gaining traction. On a whole, the market is expected to reach $4.6 billion by 2027.
How can insect agriculture revolutionize the food industry?
Image sourced from AgFunder
With a deep passion for sustainable agriculture, and how it relates to human & animal nutrition, McGill highlights that “farming insects is a very efficient way to create nutritionally-dense proteins and also soil enrichments.” Studies have proven that besides fats and proteins, insects are also an excellent source of vitamins and minerals.
Additionally, in thinking about the environmental impact of insect agriculture, “insects have greater food conversion efficiency and produce lower greenhouse gas emissions (GHGEs), while requiring less water and land compared with their vertebrate counterparts in traditional animal husbandry.” The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) notes that insects are more efficient than other animals at converting their food into meat - “on average, insects can convert 2 kg of feed into 1 kg of insect mass, whereas cattle require 8 kg of feed to produce 1 kg of body weight gain.”
To further their environmental sustainability, insect farms can also harness waste heat and steam and feed their insects with an upcycled corn-based byproduct, like InnovaFeed. Additionally, insect excrement can also be used as a crop fertilizer, which is free from antibiotics.
McGill adds that “some of the safety benefits come in the fact that insects are reared in indoor, controlled environments that can be kept extremely clean and sanitary, versus challenges large scale animal agriculture faces in this regard. Insects are ‘ectothermic’ or rely upon external heat sources to control their body temperature. Different species require varying levels of optimal humidity, and finally, it is crucial to keep unwanted pests out of rearing facilities. All of these factors make controlled environment systems crucial to rearing insects.”
Here’s how NACIA is encouraging the positive use of insects in North America.
It’s important to note that some cultures, encompassing some 2 billion people around the world, already eat bugs. For instance, wild insect gathering for food for either subsistence or sale is common throughout East Asia and the Pacific, from India to Indonesia to Japan to Australia. In the northwest Amazon region of South America, somewhere between 5-7% of total protein comes from insects.
McGill comments that as the practice of eating insects is relatively new to North America, “like any new industry, we need to educate our stakeholders about the benefits of insects as food and feed ingredients, as well as the frass (or manure) as a biofertilizer and biopesticide.”
NACIA does this “by sharing research from a nutritional or functional perspective and an environmental one” from their 12 partner universities that are “working to increase the knowledge base about insects as food, feed, pet food and soil regeneration.” McGill adds that “over time, with increased understanding and awareness about the benefits of insects, the industry is starting to have what I call ‘good problems,’ in that sometimes demand is outpacing supply.”
What’s in store for the future of insect agriculture?
Today, NACIA has nearly 200 members based in 12 countries. These include: Aspire Food Group that is currently building a 100,000 sq. ft. ‘cricket protein’ facility in Ontario, Beta Hatch that has just completed its flagship mealworm facility in central-Washington and raised $13 million in 2021, InnovaFeed that is breaking ground on a co-located black soldier fly larvae facility with ADM in 2022.
Looking to the future, McGill shares that “the insect agriculture industry is poised to accelerate even more quickly than it has in the past five years as a climate solution for agriculture, meeting the challenge of creating climate-aligned products that provide all the functional benefits as less-efficiently produced ingredients.”
To reach this goal of accelerating climate-smart solutions, we need to have a better understanding of the present of this industry. This is why NACIA has launched their 2021 Insect Agriculture Market Research survey.
The survey intends to engage “with industry stakeholders to create baseline data about key aggregated data for the industry: how many people work in this sector? What is a top-level revenue from the North American Industry? What are the growth prospects for companies? What are they selling and to whom?”
