Birds greet their food with ‘scratch dances’ and productivity is up. Could insects be an alternative to deforestation-linked soy?
It’s 10am and the hens are getting excited and bustling around. Jo and Charles Mear are approaching the hutches carrying blue crates and the birds, heads popping up, know what’s inside: black soldier fly larvae or maggots.
Watching chickens peck around for maggots should be utterly normal. Insects are a natural part of a bird’s diet, but most hens today never see one in their lifetime. Instead, they are kept indoors and fed a grain- and soy-rich diet, typically in the form of pellets.
But insects are rich in protein and essential micronutrients. They require less space, produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions and have a high feed conversion rate. And if they could reduce, even in just a small way, the dominance of rainforest-destroying soy as the feed of choice for UK chickens, the benefits could be enormous.
“[Soy is] our Achilles heel. It’s the best pound for pound source of protein so it’s hard to convince farmers to move away from it,” says Charles.
Scientists at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization certainly believe they can, concluding that insects contain the necessary nutrients, especially protein, to replace between 25–100% of soymeal for chickens. And here, on this chicken farm in Cambridgeshire, an experiment is being carried out that might bring that reality a little closer.
The Mears keep around 28,000 birds across two barns in Cambridgeshire, supplying branded free-range eggs to the Co-op, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Tesco. “We’re trying to produce a more sustainable ‘over the hedge’ farm here where we source everything we need as locally as possible. So finding a way to replace soy has been the next step for us,” says Charles.
That opportunity presented itself when by chance he heard about two Cambridge graduates who had recently founded the insect startup Better Origin. “With the guys being so close by I just said to them to come and use our farm to trial the insects,” says Charles.
In March they began hosting the UK’s first AI-powered insect mini farm in a shipping container unit, growing larvae using food waste. The specialised insect-breeding unit was built off-site and delivered straight to the farm. Batches of maggot eggs arrive every few days, and the insects are reared in an automated setup that tracks their growth using thermal cameras and AI. All Charles and Jo need to do is keep the unit supplied with energy and waste feedstocks.
The larvae grow rapidly: “5,000 times its body mass in less than a couple of weeks”, according to Better Origin’s co-founder Fotis Fotiadis, and happily live off food and crop waste. After two weeks they are ready to be fed to the hens, and a new cycle of eggs is delivered to the farm to maintain a continuous supply of insects.
The results have been unequivocally positive, say the Mears. The birds – a wonderfully healthy and energetic flock – love it: they’ve worked out the time of the day when blue containers of maggots, rather than ready-made feed, arrive, and get particularly excited when they see them coming.
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