Startups are using insect larvae to produce protein-rich animal feed | Hacker News Reader

Startups are using insect larvae to produce protein-rich animal feed

nytimes.com

42 pointsOsiris3048 comments

Meanwhile, in China...

"Cockroach farms multiplying in China" (2013)

https://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-c1-china-cockroach-20131...

> Wang Fuming ... is the largest cockroach producer in China (and thus probably in the world), with six farms populated by an estimated 10 million cockroaches. He sells them to producers of Asian medicine and to cosmetic companies that value the insects as a cheap source of protein as well as for the cellulose-like substance on their wings.

> Since Wang got into the business in 2010, the price of dried cockroaches has increased tenfold, from about $2 a pound to as much as $20, as manufacturers of traditional medicine stockpile pulverized cockroach powder.

> "I thought about raising pigs, but with traditional farming, the profit margins are very low," Wang said. "With cockroaches, you can invest 20 yuan and get back 150 yuan," or $3.25 for a return of $11.

> China has about 100 cockroach farms, and new ones are opening almost as fast as the prolific critters breed. But even among Chinese, the industry was little known until August, when a million cockroaches got out of a farm in neighboring Jiangsu province.

150/20 = 7.5 =/= 11/3.25?

Chinese accounting?

That is surprising given the appetite for pork in China and their high prices.

And, given that cockroaches are expected to survive nuclear holocaust, you won't have an Asian Roach Flu epidemic wipe out your business.

> You Might Not Want to Eat Bugs. But Would You Eat Meat That Ate Bugs?

Ummm. Free-range chickens love insects. Trout also eat lots of insects. And pigs. Well, I'm not going into what pigs will eat.

AFAICT, chickens also eat any rodents stupid enough to go near them. If chickens were our size they'd be terrifying.

That's basically what an ostrich is. They're chickens that can kill you.

Now that I think of it, I suppose that makes sense considering the whole "birds are dinosaurs" thing.

If only the 9ft tall terror birds [1] from South America hadn't gone extinct 1.8 million years ago, we would never have thought Dinosaurs went extinct in the first place (or said differently, the fast that birds are dinosaurs would have been obvious from the start).

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phorusrhacidae

If they were our size, they'd be velociraptors.

If rotisserie velociraptor is as good as chicken, I think I could endorse the risks involved with a revival of the species.

Carnivore meats aren't generally considered as good or trophically advisable given bioaccumulation. Fish are one area we tend to ignore that perhaps because of how obfuscated the ecosystem has been historically - we didn't see what they ate.

I think you mean Utahraptor [1]. Velociraptors are about chicken sized [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utahraptor

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velociraptor

Fair enough.

Present day, I'd say mainly watch out for eagles. At least, if you're a child. Ostriches too, but they won't hunt you.

I don't believe they actually hunt them, but in reality are protecting their eggs.

Mice/rats/etc LOVE eggs. Chickens (and all birds) know this. As ground layers, they're surely protective of their eggs from mice.

There was a book that became a TV movie called the Hoboken Chicken Emergency on this subject. I think it started out terrifying, but since it was made for kids didn't stay that way. Probably not a very accurate depiction.

These are things I try not to think about. And not just with animals: plants have grown from and frequently come in direct contact with poo, and that's not a great thought either. Maybe it will be easier when vat grown meat scales up.

I've eaten lots of Psilocybe spp. But the first time I picked them from cow patties, I hesitated. And ended up making tea.

Fresh mushroom picking always seems like a dangerous game to me. How were you 100% sure it was what you thought it was and not something that kills you?

Identifying mushrooms is not that difficult. You need a good book and some diligence. Lots of people pick all kinds mushrooms regularly and accidents are relatively rare.

It also depends on where you look for them. In Europe there is only one mushroom you can pick by mistake. The way to check if it is dangerous (and not really that much dangerous) is to lick it. If it has strong sour taste it is bad (licking it won't get you sick, you need to eat it whole). Most of the times people make mistakes when picking bladed mushrooms that are not even that closely looking as the eatable one.

Mainly because I was with people who had eaten mushrooms from this cow pasture. Also because I know what Psilocybe look like. And that they turn blue where bruised with a fingernail etc.

I don't get why this grosses you out at all.

We have the water cycle, the carbon cycle, etc. The planet is reusing materials all the time. Thus, some of your clean drinking water was someone's pee at some point before.

I don't see why that is gross at all. Drinking actual pee would be super gross. But drinking water that used to be pee is still just water now and that's all the matters.

Intellectually it doesn't bother me. I think it grosses me out because modern society abstracts away nearly all aspects of food production from consumers. At the same time, there's a strong cultural aversion (at least in the West) to eating something like bugs and even more so for consuming human/animal waste. It's not technically bugs or waste anymore, but the association is still there, even if it's illogical.

I live in an intentional community that composts. And many of us are on the non-meat spectrum, so meat scraps are verboten in the compost.

I've pointed out that soil is already loaded with remains of dead animals. But to no avail.

Being vegetarian or vegan doesn't mean not eating anything that contains molecules that previously were meat. It means not eating anything that is an animal product.

By definition decomposers are converting the animal products into basical minerals and nutrients because THEY are eating the meat.

Otherwise plant matter couldn't even be eaten because some of the carbon has been through the carbon cycle and was previously an animal.

Cattle aren't exactly picky about what they mow down along with their grass or hay or grain either. And if there's ever been a bale of hay that wasn't crawling with spiders and all manner of other beasties, I haven't seen it.

I think pigs would eat most of the things used to feed the insects, so this step seems rather unnecessary.

I just posted a podcast episode, 222: Why Eat Insects http://joshuaspodek.com/guests/rants-raves-and-monologues-vo..., on why we're seeing all these clever new ways to create food: bugs, vertical farming, fake meat, in-vitro meat, etc.

Why didn't we think of them before?

Not because now we're more clever. Because we had better options. We're scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Few meat eaters choose crickets over steaks and hamburgers, but we've squandered what was once plenty. We've become more efficient, but we've lost abundance.

With a lower population we could keep abundance.

In terms of global hunger, the world has never had it as good as it is now. [0] Yes, people still starve, so "good" is highly relative, but even with rates on a plateua, we're significantly better off when compared to prior generations.

What you're seeing isn't lack of choices, it's the cross section of market forces and a growing cultural change that wants what they consider to be ethical, sustainable food.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment

There's a lot of money chasing meat-alternative startups. And that means a lot of PR and PR dollars.

It's hard for me to imagine we are scraping the bottom of the barrel when pork chops are 99 cents a pound in the grocery store.

Yeah, probably not. But then there is a lot of government intervention in American farming.

The last hundred years have been a constant churn of new ideas and technology in agriculture, and food in general. Seeing a bunch of clever ways to make food on the horizon isn't some recent change.

The first scene in Blade Runner 2049 takes place in a 'protein farm'. The farmer grows parthogenic worm-like creatures in pits filled with some sort of nutrient goo.

Parthogenic means they can reproduce asexually, and they're all clones of each other. Indeed, the few animals that reproduce like this can do so extremely fast.

Exactly what I was thinking of. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before we go from insects->livestock->humans to insects->humans as shown in Blade Runner 2049.

I believe in the movie it is implied that the protein is used on replicants of humans, or of animals which are then consumed by humans. Though it's never really that clear, I suppose.

The world in the movie was quite devoid of animal farming / husbandry.

As an aside Snowpiercer had a related concept - grinding cockroaches to make protein bars...

Not animal farming. Replicants of animals.

Remember the snake and the owl in the original movie?

I'd eat insects as soon as they're available in my local supermarket at an acceptable price. I've seen insect burgers in the supermarket, but they were about twice as expensive as beef.

And movie screen writers are not fiction story tellers. They talk to people while travelling across countries, know their cultures and mix and match. Tada - scene ready.

Pay detail attention to movie scenes, it speaks of truth.

HN Title: > Startups are using insect larvae to produce protein-rich animal feed

Article title: > You Might Not Want to Eat Bugs. But Would You Eat Meat That Ate Bugs?

Sentence from article: > AgriProtein is among a _small number of start-ups_ that are using insect larvae

So, what would an intrepid startup rancher feed a herd of roaches?

Someone attempt to make a case for me for how raising insects for protein can ever compete against farming duckweed.

Duckweed has no negative associations with eating insects, it doubles in volume every 2 or 3 days,it produces high levels of proteins with several vitamins including D, it can be grown from sewage if needed, it cleans up polluting waterways, the list goes on and on.

No need for cages, artificial lights, heaters, smell, special insect feed, etc.

Thanks for the comment!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemnoideae [Duckweed]

I'm guiding myself in life after this saying: There’s actually no such thing as waste.

I totally agree that that kind of industry could help feed a growing human population in a way that’s less damaging to the environment.

We are making progress!

Why not just feed cows on grass, which is what they traditionally eat? In the UK cows usually graze outdoors in fields during the summer, and in the winter they usually stay in barns where they are fed on hay and silage (usually from fermented grass).

Logistics and relatedly prices I believe is why. The tradition there was because grass was cheaper to grow than hay to feed them. Now it is the opposite and has probably been so for a while.

Grass takes more time to fatten them for slaughter and it being cheaper to bring the feed to them than to cattle drive them around to even cheap feeds.

Maize (the winner of the local grain corn title) is a type of grass technically but one whose mutated seed size and height are way up there and given that it is human edible (even the field corn variants which are terrible tasting) the trophic layer issues become egregiously obvious.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com