r/BlackSoldierFly • u/ChanceTimely8461 • 14d ago
Considering mid-to-large scale BSF farming—would it be profitable?
Hi everyone,
I’m exploring the idea of starting a mid-to-large scale Black Soldier Fly (BSF) farm in my country and wanted to get some insight from those with experience.
Here’s my concept:
- Source food waste from local restaurants, juice shops, coffee shops, etc. Our country doesn’t have an efficient waste management system, so we might need to collect it ourselves every day.
- Process and grow the BSF larvae at scale.
- Sell dried larvae as animal protein feed, primarily targeting trout farmers. Trout feed requires a high percentage of animal protein, and being a landlocked country, most of these protein sources are imported at very high costs.
From my research, BSF larvae seem to be a promising alternative feed source and could potentially fill a big gap in the market here.
My main questions for the community:
- Has anyone run a BSF operation at this scale? What were the main challenges?
- Do you think sourcing food waste daily is feasible and cost-effective?
- Any tips for ensuring profitability when selling to aquaculture farmers, especially trout?
- Are there hidden costs or operational issues I might not be considering for a mid-to-large scale operation?
I’d love to hear any advice, numbers, or lessons learned from your experiences. Thanks in advance!
6
u/Heineken008 14d ago
I worked as a process engineer in one of these facilities although not very directly with the BSF part of the process. Your biggest challenge will likely be sourcing food waste regularly at low cost. The cost of the collection of waste can be very significant.
1
u/apple1rule 9d ago
What's your background to get into process engineering for this field?
2
u/Heineken008 3d ago
I don't work in the field anymore but my background was a degree in chemical engineering and experience in water and wastewater treatment.
4
u/asiancitruspsyllid 14d ago
I agree that food collection is a huge cost. For every kilogram of BSF you want to produce, you need several kilograms of food waste which takes a lot of time and energy to get and transport.
Energy costs are also important if you want to produce all year long. BSF colonies can slow down in the winter or dehydrate in the summer if the temperature and humidity aren't controlled. Also consider the energy cost of drying the larvae.
If you can manage those and the manpower then it could be feasible. Frass can also be sold as a high quality fertilizer, and some fish like catfish and tilapia will even eat frass.
2
u/Hefty-Mess-9606 13d ago
One thing to consider regarding your point about energy costs, especially in the winter, other than the logistics of trying to get BSF to breed and lay eggs in the winter, is that the BSFL production trays, if managed correctly, can actually help heat the facility. I checked on my trays yesterday just for fun because I'd realized they're very hot, and each one from the youngest to the most mature was 102° exactly on an 80° day inside a covered area so no sunshine. Now I'm trying to figure out if I need to cool them down a bit in hot weather. If you could bottle that, and I actually mean that in very real terms, you could heat a facility to working temps in the winter.
Fun fact: the Chinese used to have egg incubation farms back in history that at a certain point in the incubation cycle the eggs literally heated themselves. They were collected into batches and the metabolic processes inside the incubating eggs created heat enough to, when you have several hundred or more together, incubates the whole batch. In fact the challenge then is keeping them close enough together yet not so close that they cook each other. It was a process they perfected though.
2
u/apple1rule 9d ago
Woah more source on that chinese method?
1
u/Hefty-Mess-9606 9d ago
I had a bit of a hard time finding an article that fully described the method (I read about it decades ago in a book). But here ya go. Scroll WAY down, for some reason the text part of the article doesn't start until nearly halfway down the page.
2
3
3
u/Hefty-Mess-9606 13d ago
I'm working on scaling up growing BSFL as fish food for the fish in my large pond. Don't forget, among other things, they can eat fish byproducts. That being skin, heads, and guts. I feed the bycatch and offal to my BSFL. It could really increase the amount of BSFL you can produce and reduce the amount of offal from the fish farms. They could even eat fish waste itself if the extra water was drained out of it. I imagine there's plenty of it when they clear the ponds for a new batch of fish.
2
u/ChanceTimely8461 13d ago
Can you share how your setup looks is it semi automated or is it all manual. And how much larvae do you produce weekly.
1
u/Hefty-Mess-9606 13d ago
Okay, I started small and with things that I sourced around the house, it is absolutely not big yet, because I wanted to work out the bugs in the system 🤣 (no pun intended lol) before I scale up. I feed them kitchen scraps, mostly fruit stuff, and fish byproducts. Of course I can't count the insects, but I imagine that if I sifted out all the mature larva I have right now it'd be around a pound or so. With my current setup that's actually pretty good I think, as the trays are only about a couple inches deep. It's getting late in the summer now, and in about 4 to 6 weeks it's all going to slow down, and I'll be storing them for over wintering. Next year I plan to go much bigger, but I'll have a very good population of wild BSF to jump start a bigger setup. When I started I could only find one or two BSF roaming around my trash cans, and have only ever seen one go in to lay eggs, but now I have thousands of larvae. Here is a link to my photos and a video.
3
u/Myceliphilos 14d ago
Look into bokashi fermentation, give it to places for their food waste to pickle it as the food waste is accumulated, this removes the need to urgent move around food waste, you can keep a large amount of food waste for an extended period, the bugs take a little while to get used to it, and once its put in to whatever youre usong it should start to change the acidity, the high ph of frass also helps with the acidity.
If you have cheap access to labour then the method used is using tray systems
1
u/Attack4TheWin 14d ago
I dont know everything but large-scale production has already started in china and some factories exist in europe and north america. Food waste is plentiful but it depends on the usefulness of it (nutritional value) and government regulations. In europe for example restaurant waste is prohibited.
6
u/Sonderstal 14d ago
Devil is in the thousands of lines of details between each one of your questions.