at Caspian acres there's a menagerie of mouths to feed there's chickens ducks and guinea fowl they roam alongside a rather proud turkey and everything else that's farmed here is the sheep and pigs are more than content with the tubs of fruit veggies and restaurant waste tossed their way but when a vast Valley Mahajan and his wife anastasia expanded their brood of birds it hits the bottom line when we started raising ducks and chickens on the farm we realized quickly that we weren't making any money eggs and chicken eggs because all the feed cost was so
high they were having to buy a protein feed that contains soy but the cost was threatening to derail their whole dream of running a sustainable farm yeah yeah he was quite amazed or asked whose background is in computer science looked for a solution we found one in a fly well actually in its Lorber here is a tray with a whole bunch of eggs on it so there's hundreds of thousands of larvae and there's a little section there's always so that is just over half a gram they can be seen more clearly under a microscope here
we have a whole bunch of flies that are turning into pre pupae once they hatch they become larvae and are high in protein perfect food for his hungry birds so how much trial and error has there been to get to this point tons and tons of toy you know I just been I've had them failing about every possible way that could fail these larvae come from the black soldier fly an insect that needs to be in a warm humid environment in his first few attempts the Flies died once he got the temperature right there was
another issue the Flies would meet some people on the internet we're saying that if you play some type of musics then they start mating more I tried that I actually just wanted to see if it's true but I didn't use it did you play I played Lola disco and like like dance music into it thankfully the flies ended up sorting that part out on their own and our ass is now a full-fledged bug farmer albeit on a much smaller scale than what's happening in Langley BC so here we have our entire grubs product so the
whole larvae fried nothing added to it these millions of larvae are destined to be turned into feed and tara is one of the world's largest companies betting on the black soldier fly think it's the greatest thing in the world so and Victoria Lee young came on board after responding to an ad on Craigslist that asked prospective hires if they wanted to change the world there's limited resources on this planet there's only so much arable land we have to grow crops and food for people there's only so much water that we can utilize and so I
think it's really important that the world is looking for more sustainable ways of growing our food and how did the larvae help with that well for one they grow really quickly from their lifecycle from egg to when they're ready to be harvested is about three weeks and in that time they grow 1 million percent of their weight they are voracious eaters just watch as the larvae tear apart this hamburger out in Tara they're fed mountains of produce most of these fruit and vegetables still look great but by the time they make it to the grocery
store shelf they'll be past their prime so what would end up in the garbage gets trucked here instead the larvae don't need any water and take up very little space before they're turned into feed for pets poultry and fish it's about 40% protein 40% fats and the company is hoping one day also you and I we see that as being the Holy Grail we think we're probably a few more years out of it then then we like but we've certainly seen the trend for insects take off in the human food market back at Caspian acres
they haven't snacked on the larvae themselves yet but they feed them to their ducklings and all the other births but there's no large industrial operation here these ones were baked in the oven for a low temperature and I kind of dry them out slowly and then some of them are just strained through material to try to get excess moisture out of it just like you would granola little granola their bugs and they get the food to feed the bugs from the local food bank which has a program to help cut down on food waste so
here's an example of a bin we fill up the truck every second day and this whole food will last about one day the farm will use it up so this is a black soldier fly for us basically their poop as for all the waste the Lord they produce well that gets used to in compost we always kind of wanted the farm to be a combination of different animals and wanted to make everything kind of work together so when we look at it and we sort of started reading it it felt like missing puzzle piece and
now that they've overcome all of the challenges and raising and harvesting the larvae they're thinking about becoming greeters so they can help others learn the basics of farming Buck's Pryor Stewart CBC News near calyx
