Project
Combat poverty by circular agriculture concepts applied to aquaculture
Protein sources in animal feed currently are soybean meal and fishmeal. Both sources are expensive, often reliant on imports and not sustainable. Insects can be reared on local organic reststreams, thus providing a high quality protein source that is produced through a circular approach.
Fish provide an important protein source for poor people, but aquaculture currently relies on expensive, non-sustainable protein sources such as fishmeal and soybean meal. A novel protein source for feed consists of insects such as the Black Soldier Fly that can be reared on local organic waste streams, thus closing the nutrient loop and contributing to circularizing agriculture. This project will investigate the opportunities to transform aquaculture by local production of insects on organic rest streams and focusses on the economic aspects. This relates both to on-farm approaches where insects are produced on fish farms as well as approaches where farmers produce insects for feed mills. The focus is on the use of knowledge developed in Kenya, now applied to smallholder farmers in Colombia with an outlook to opportunities for disseminating to other Latin American countries.