An arms race underway in France vies to build the world’s largest insect farm, as several companies seek to capitalize on what has been estimated by one market analysis firm to become a 3.3 billion USD industry by 2027 [
1]. Opened in December 2023, the current champion is a 45 000 m
2 farm outside Amiens, built by Paris-based firm Ÿnsect to annually produce more than 100 000 t of mealworms, larvae of the beetle
Tenebrio molitor [
2]. The Amiens farm dethroned a 35 000 m
2 facility capable of annually producing 15 000 t of protein from larvae of the black soldier fly (
Hermetia illucens) that InnovaFeed, Ÿnsect’s rival Parisian biotechnology company, opened in April 2023 in Nesle, France (
Fig. 1) [
3]. However, a planned expansion of the Nesle farm will enlarge its footprint to 55 000 m
2 and increase its annual production to 75 000 t in late 2024, vaulting it back to the top [
3]. InnovaFeed also has plans to open a 100 000 m
2 farm in Decatur, IL, USA, in 2026 [
4].
Although humans have been eating insects for millennia, and billions of people still do today, the growing insect farming industry is not, for the most part, serving up insects for human consumption. Instead, both startup companies and big agribusiness concerns are looking to worm their way into the pet, aquaculture, and livestock feed markets, with promises of automated factories running 24/7 and producing vast amounts of insect protein—primarily from mealworms, black soldier fly larvae (
Fig. 2), and crickets. (The world’s largest cricket farm, in London, ON, Canada, occupies 14 000 m
2 and produces 12 000 t of crickets annually [
5].) These particular insects offer high feed-conversion ratios, and their production requires less water and land use and emits less greenhouse gas than the production of traditional livestock protein.
Protein comprises as much as 60% of edible insects [
6], which is higher than most plant protein sources, including cereals, soybeans, and lentils [
7]. For the same amount of protein, crickets, for example, require about six times less feed than cattle, four times less than sheep, and two times less than pigs and chickens [
8]. One estimate suggests that farming insects to produce an equivalent amount of protein reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 72% to 95% compared to the meat industry [
9].
Insect farming could, however, offer more than simply a more sustainable source of high-quality protein. Not tainted by the hormones commonly found in livestock-based feeds, insect-based feeds may also contain molecules that benefit animal health, including antimicrobial peptides, which are naturally produced by many kinds of insects due to their consumption of decaying organic matter [
10]. In addition, the oil that comes with insect protein has been suggested to benefit pet coat and skin health [
11] and to help prevent or reduce the effects of cognitive decline in dogs [
12]. The chitin in insects’ outer shells, a non-digestible polysaccharide, also gives insect-based feeds the added beneficial properties of a prebiotic fiber [
13]. Insect farmers can also harvest the chitin and insect feces for use as fertilizers [
14] and some researchers are exploring the potential use of insect-derived chitin in cosmetics [
15].
These additional properties could help with market development, said Jeffrey Tomberlin, professor of entomology at Texas A&M University in College Station, TX, USA. Tomberlin also directs the National Science Foundation Center for Environmental Sustainability through Insect Farming, which connects industry partners with universities to conduct research on increasing the efficiency of insect farming. “We need to continue diversifying the market,” Tomberlin said. “Diversification creates opportunities to identify components that may have a higher price point and can internally subsidize the market. What we see as the primary product today, protein, may become a secondary product in the future. If that happens, the price drops.” Recent estimates of the price of insect protein range from 3800 to 6000 USD·t
−1. In contrast, fishmeal prices range between 1400 and 1800 USD·t
−1 and soybeans cost about 500 USD·t
−1 [
16].
Pet feed is just the beginning for insect farming. In 2022, the European Union (EU) began allowing farmers to feed insects to pigs and poultry—a reversal of the ban on “processed animal proteins and insects” enacted following a mad cow disease outbreak in the mid-1990s [
17]. While most Western cultures retain a strong stigma against insect consumption, the “yuck factor” is lower when consumption is indirect via animal products. Research published in 2019 suggests that about 73% of people globally are willing to eat fish, chicken, or pork fed on a diet containing insect protein [
18].
The poultry and pig feed markets are enormous—in just the EU alone, 146 million pigs and 7.2 billion chickens are consumed each year [
19], [
20]. Currently, most of the feed used in raising these animals is made from soybeans, the cultivation of which is a leading cause of deforestation around the world, notably in Brazil and the Amazon rainforest [
17]. Piglets are also fed fish meal, which is associated with the problem of overfishing. To replace even a fraction of this livestock feed market with insect protein would require massively boosting insect production, hence the growing interest in building more and bigger insect farms.
One aspect of insect farming that makes economic sense is that the insects can be raised on by-products and other waste the agriculture industry otherwise spends money on to dispose of. “It is unimaginable how much food gets wasted globally”, said Martin Pike, chief executive officer of Viridian Renewable Technology, an insect protein producer based in Derrimut, VIC, Australia. “The opportunity to repurpose it is huge”.
Insects fed on pre-consumer food waste—“Anything that has not touched a fork”, said Tomberlin—and bred close to the farms or food processing plants that will eventually buy them can be a more sustainable source of protein for feeds than the standard soybeans or fishmeal. If, on the other hand, companies raise their insects on processed feed that could otherwise have gone directly to livestock, insect farming can be more expensive and worse for the environment [
21].
“We are never going to replace a cornfield with an insect farm”, said Christine Picard, a professor of biology at Indiana University (Indianapolis, IN, USA) who does genetic research on insects farmed for protein. “But we do need more protein, and this is hopefully one way we can produce it more sustainably without destroying more of the planet”.
Insect farming startup companies dangling the promise of more sustainably grown proteins have attracted more than 1 billion USD in venture capital since 2020 [
22]. Indeed, insect farming has such great potential for sustainability that it is being studied as a means to feed astronauts on extended space flights [
23]. Big agribusiness companies have started to embrace insect farming. For example, Tyson Foods (Springdale, AK, USA), the world’s second-largest producer of chicken, beef, and pork [
24], recently invested in startup Protix (Dongen, the Netherlands). Like InnovaFeed, Protix grows black soldier fly larvae, favored by some due to their ability to consume nearly anything and grow rapidly. This partnership includes plans to build a 45 000 m
2 farm in the United States (specific location not yet announced) by the end of 2025 to upcycle Tyson’s food manufacturing by-products into insect proteins and lipids [
25]. Similarly, food-processing giant Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) (Chicago, IL, USA) signed a partnership with InnovaFeed in 2020 [
26]. The French firm, which has pioneered the world’s first commercially sold insect-fed trout [
27] and chicken [
28], opened a 10 000 m
2 research innovation center in the United States in Decatur, IL, in April 2024 [
4]. When the center is built out into a large-scale production facility with a 100 000 m
2 footprint in 2026, it will annually produce up to 60 000 t of animal feed protein, 20 000 t oils for poultry and swine feed, and 400 000 t of soil amendment. A pipeline connects the farm to an ADM corn processing mill; the set up will avoid the wasting of up to 270 000 t of by-products per year by feeding it to the larvae [
4]. “We will be seeing more of these large sites—economy of scale is real in the insect industry,” said Tomberlin. “These huge factories are all-inclusive. They are the waste recipient, nursery, harvesting center, and processing center. They are everything,”
According to Pike, companies lacked the knowledge to build such large-scale factories prior to advancements made in the last ten years. “When you first do this on a lab scale, you have no idea what it is like to do it at commercial scale,” he said. “Increasing production by 100, 1000, or 10 000 times to reach that scale is a significant challenge. If you plan to just copy and paste the same thing a hundred times, you miss out on many efficiency gains,”
One important efficiency opportunity is heat management. Immature insects require heat to survive. InnovaFeed, for example, uses waste heat from a biomass plant—a giant furnace that burns organic material to generate electricity—adjacent to its Nesle facility to keep its fly larvae at a toasty 30 °C [
29]. However, the farm’s adult insects that continually produce the larvae naturally generate their own heat, so they must be actively cooled down to prevent overheating. But running an air conditioning unit 24 hours a day can be prohibitively expensive. “You have to get very creative about heat management to make the endeavor commercially viable,” Pike said. InnovaFeed’s Nesle facility, for example, is outfitted with more than 10 000 sensors to measure, control, and optimize temperature and humidity at all times. The facility was also designed with fluid dynamics software to model the air flow throughout the building [
30].
Another challenge inside massive facilities is managing transport of the insects around the factory as they transition through life stages. Engineers struggle with whether to employ conveyor belts, automated robots, or, because not every process is amenable to automation, low-tech solutions such as workers pushing insects around in trolleys. “Some companies are trying to roboticize every process to minimize labor costs, but these are demanding environments, prone to machine wear,” Pike said. “If you have a very sensitive robot, a bug can crawl inside and put it out of commission, so you have to resist the urge to over-engineer every step,”
According to Pike, factory operators can also apply artificial intelligence to nearly every facet of insect protein production. Changing any one variable can have major consequences for the health of the insects by the time they reach the end of their lifecycle. For example, changing the temperature at which the eggs are stored by a single degree can impact how many larvae are produced, how healthy they are, and how effectively the adults breed. “Looking at all the factors involved is too data-intensive to do on a human scale,” Pike said. “But sophisticated algorithms can return meaningful results about potential impacts,”
Beyond boosting factory efficiency, researchers are working on tweaking insect biology to optimize production. “I worked on colony management methodologies for the black soldier fly back in the 1990s, and those methods have not really evolved much,” said Tomberlin. “By no means are we tapping into the full potential of insects yet,” Tomberlin and Picard point to gene modification as a prime example of unrealized potential for increasing yields. But such modification will probably be of genes not directly involved in protein production, Picard said. “Is someone going to genetically modify an insect so that it produces more protein? That is unlikely because that is a difficult, tightly controlled system,”
Genetic modification might instead, for example, target elongating the insects’ eating life stage, which would result in larger larvae with more protein. Another target could be genes that might be modified to create designer insects with nutrients that increase health benefits to the pets, fish, or livestock to which the insects are fed. “You could imagine being able to use the insect as a little pharmaceutical manufacturing plant,” Picard said. “There are so many engineering opportunities at hand on the technology and biology fronts. We are at the very beginning stages of what could be exponential growth for the industry.”
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