There is a buzz around insect protein in the broiler industry, does the idea have legs?

Insect agriculture has in recent years risen from relative obscurity to become a widely discussed potential solution to the global protein challenge, attracting keen interest across agriculture and waste processing industries. It is a potential solution to three challenges facing the broiler chicken industry: pressure to move away from traditional to ‘sustainable’ protein sources in broiler feed, demands for higher animal welfare from interest groups, and how to combat the ongoing concerns caused by land application of poultry manure. However, it is yet unclear whether insect protein is an actual solution to these problems, or, a case of the emperor's new clothes, attracting significant funding but unable to survive as a standalone industry.  

The aim of the study was to understand the challenges facing insect agriculture and to see if the benefits it may offer can be captured by the broiler industry. This involved looking into both smaller, on-farm production systems and larger, industrial level insect agriculture. Due to the specific regulations facing the UK, it was chosen to investigate what is being done at home, in Europe with rules that are likely to be in line with those the UK will adopt and in Africa where regulation far more relaxed.  

The study identified three key challenges facing the insect agriculture industry.  

1. Regulation – currently insects can only be fed live in the UK to prevent them being classified as Processed Animal Protein. Furthermore, insects are currently treated the same as conventional livestock and so are subject to the same restrictions on what they can be fed.
2. Cost of production – cost of production is far greater than conventional protein sources such as soybean meal. This is due to a variety of reasons including: set up costs, labour, energy, secondary processing costs, substrate costs, and egg / neonate production costs.  
3. Scalability – to have any meaningful impact on the current UK soya usage for poultry feed, insect production will have to grow substantially. The level of expansion needed may not fully comprehended by those in the insect industry in the UK. 

An area that requires further investigation is the potential to use insects to process broiler manure. This reduces the moisture content of the poultry manure while retaining much of the nitrogen which in turn would reduce the haulage costs to allow the poultry manure to transported to an area in need of fertiliser. At the same time, at the plant where the larvae were grown, the oil could be extracted from the larvae for biodiesel to be used to manage temperature control needed in larvae production and processing the protein meal, so making the protein the bioproduct of the system and potentially eliminating current cost of production challenge.