WWF Champions Sustainable Animal Feed: Turning Waste into Solutions

Harnessing the power of insects

Besides directly feeding excess food to livestock animals, there are also examples of using food system waste to create entirely new livestock feed production loops. Perhaps the most current innovation can be seen in the growth of the insect protein industry over recent decades—particularly black soldier fly larvae. WWF supports a pilot project in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe that cleverly harnesses the power of this humble insect. The project uses nothing more complex than fly larvae with hearty appetites to break down excess food and/or manure. As a result, the larvae transform waste into beneficial products. The larvae can be harvested and processed as a feed ingredient, or fed intact to chickens, serving as a nutritional, inexpensive alternative to traditional livestock feed ingredients like soybean meal. Plus, larvae manure serves as an organic fertilizer!

Using insects as an ingredient in animal feed has the potential to change the industry. Black soldier fly larvae can consume food from a wide variety of sources, take up almost no land, and hold tremendous nutritional value, making them a sustainable option for feeding fish, chickens, pigs, and even pets^3,4,5. Imagine donating your dinner scraps to a farm that uses those scraps to raise fly larvae as feed for their animals and then supply you with locally raised pork, poultry, and fish!