Insect-larvae used as sustainable fish feed is getting more and more attention.
he interest in production and use of sustainable insect larvae is growing rapidly. A new 65 mill kr. Horizon 2020 Project (SUSINCHAIN) seeks to help large scale insect production meet the needs of fish and animal farmers. A new Norwegian project to aims to fulfill needs and improve wellbeing of farmed fish – and a path is to include insect meal in the feed. They stress that instead of throwing out 20% of all our food, this could be a sustainable resource for insect production. On a global scale, insect meal based on organic waste could provide three times as much protein as all the soya produces today – if fed to larvae! (Lock, Havforskningsinstituttet, N). Insect meal contains all the amino acids that fish need. Insects can transform carbohydrates for bio waste resources and side streams into a form that the fish need and can take up very efficiently.
BIOCAS-partners from Lolland-Falster share the knowledge derived from BIOCAS, and continue to follow the development of a fish feed based on the BIOCAS larvae i.e. at Rostock University, as part of an UMBRELLA study tour.
Together with new potential fish-in-a-barn farmers and expertise from the Danish aquaculture sector as well as Aarhus University, we visited Dr. Adrian Bischoff-Lang, who showed the fish-breeding facilities at Rostock University. Unfortunately, due to corona the fish feeding project, with larvae bred on our local biomasses from Lolland-Falster has been postponed.
As a very interesting part of the study tour, we visited Circular Farm in Lüchow, a commercial fish production, which is, truly circular economy: the residual heat from biogas-electricity production is used to heat the water for Clarias (African catfish) and bones and intestines from the fish are used as feed for the pigs, that deliver slurry for biogas! Very inspiring – and the smoked cat fish tastes delicious J
Introduction to the test facility where our BIOCAS insect protein will be tested ad feed ingredient for fish.
The Pommerehne GbR owns, besides an agricultural area of 800 hectares, three own biogas plants, which provide the electrical and thermal energy for the operation in addition to feeding electrical energy into the power system. In addition to pig fattening and breeding, the farm also has two separate aquaculture recirculation systems, which produce a total of 550 tons of African catfish annually and slaughter, process and partially refine them in the farm’s own facility.