What are the market prospects and development potential of insect farming?
Insects are the largest group in the animal kingdom, a precious resource that humanity should fully utilize, one of the important ways to solve the shortage of animal protein, a new way to ensure food supply, and the best choice for improving the environment. Insects have short generations, reproduce rapidly, and have a high food conversion rate; their overall biomass may exceed the total biomass of all land animals: the insect world contains extremely rich resources and is an important renewable biological resource. Insects are the last piece of cake God left for humanity.
The industrial utilization of insect farming both possesses the characteristics of an emerging industry field and has a long history. Our ancestors have a 5,000-year history of utilizing silkworms; China's history of beekeeping spans at least 3,000 years; China's records of Chinese gallnuts can be traced back 2,000 years to the "Classic of Mountains and Seas"; the use of insect white wax has a history of over 1,700 years; moreover, using insects as food may have accompanied the entire evolutionary history of humanity.
Due to the diversity of insect resource functions, insect farming applications can currently be divided into nine major fields:
Pollinating insect industry
Insect pollination has always been called the “wings of agricultural production.” There are many types of such insects, mainly bees, mason bees, and bumblebees, with others including flies, beetles, moths and butterflies, thrips, and mosquitoes. After various bees pollinate rapeseed, cotton, melons, fruits, and vegetables, yields generally increase by about 30%. When pollinating leguminous forage such as alfalfa, seed yields can increase by 1 to 2 times. According to reports, the economic benefits of increased crop yields from bee pollination far exceed the total value of bee products (honey, royal jelly, beeswax, bee pollen, etc.) by dozens or even hundreds of times. Some countries list bee pollination of crops as one of the measures of modern agriculture. During crop flowering seasons, renting bee colonies at a certain rate to pollinate crops has become institutionalized.
In recent years, China has begun to attach importance to research on and utilization of bee pollination of crops and has received obvious economic benefits, but the potential is far from being fully realized and should be vigorously promoted.
Medicinal insect industry
Medicinal insects refer to species whose whole bodies or parts are directly or indirectly used as medicine. Among them, the most economically valuable is Cordyceps (pupa fungus) produced by Cordyceps fungi parasitizing various insects; the most famous is Chinese cordyceps produced after larvae of the genus Hepialus are parasitized by Cordyceps fungi. Other medicinal insects include ground beetles (wingless cockroach), lanternflies (candlefly), stiff silkworm, stiff pupa, mantis egg cases (ootheca), cicada slough, nine-fragrance bug (Pentatomidae), antlion larvae (Neuroptera, Myrmeleontidae larvae), and tussah silkworm pupae, etc. In the high-tech medicinal insect industry, products will be developed such as antibacterial peptides extracted from fly maggots, anti-aging substances refined from insect protein, and biotechnology reagents made from insect toxins.
Edible insect industry
Edible insect resources have production and nutritional advantages unmatched by other organisms: insects have short life cycles and strong reproductive capacity, are suitable for large-scale factory breeding production, and have the “five savings” characteristics: saving land, saving water, saving energy, saving feed, and saving labor. Insects have high protein content, as much as 50%-75%, with some reaching over 85%; high amino acid content with reasonably balanced composition; insect fats are mostly soft fats and unsaturated fats with good digestibility; they are also relatively rich in trace elements and low in sugar content. Therefore, insects will have great development space in the food field. Interestingly, although the need for sterols in insect food is universal, for some species and genera, cholesterol is not absolutely required; in some species and genera, especially phytophagous insects, the function of cholesterol may be fulfilled by plant sterols. This phenomenon makes insect oils significantly different from other terrestrial animal oils with high cholesterol content, thus making it possible for them to become food or animal oil resources with low cholesterol content.
A very important significance of developing insect lipids also lies in benefiting environmental protection. Many insects can be raised using non-edible resources and waste as raw materials, and through artificial breeding methods, clean insect bodies can ultimately be obtained as cheap high-quality oil and protein food resources. For example, the dung-feeding insect black soldier fly can digest large amounts of pig, chicken, and other livestock and poultry manure in a short time, playing a role in purifying the surrounding environment. Housefly larvae, ants, and others have also been used as raw materials for food and medicine. There are many examples in this area of turning waste into treasure and turning harm into benefit, thereby obtaining enormous comprehensive benefits.
For the development of insect lipids, systematic and in-depth basic research is still lacking, especially data on functional lipid components and other physiologically active components (including substances with strong anti-cancer activity) in existing edible insects. Industrialized examples are also limited to some accumulative special lipids, such as insect white wax, beeswax, cantharidin, etc., while industrial products as edible functional oils are extremely rare. At present, a relatively prominent example of insect oil development is silkworm pupa oil extracted by pressing or leaching from the byproduct of the silk reeling industry———silkworm pupae (China's potential resource is about 10,000 tons/year). Abroad, it has been used to prepare drugs for lowering blood cholesterol, margarine, lubricating oil, cutting oil, washing oil, drying oil, black oil ointment, azelaic acid, and surfactant intermediates, etc. Domestically, it has also been used for soap making, Turkey red oil, and plasticizers. Moreover, the insects in China that have truly achieved large-scale production through artificial feed or successful rearing are only a few species such as ground beetles, bees, cantharidin beetles, yellow mealworms, Chinese gall aphids, and lac insects. These form huge obstacles to large-scale production of edible insect oils. More importantly, comprehensive utilization of insect lipids is a systematic project requiring joint efforts and collaboration across multiple disciplines including entomology, oil and plant protein engineering, medicinal chemistry, pharmacology, medicine, and pharmaceutics. The author firmly believes that in the near future, with the continuous expansion of basic research and innovation and improvement of engineering application technology, the development of insect active ingredient products and edible insect oils will break through the above bottlenecks and bring enormous benefits to human environment and life.
The industrial development of feed insect resources is a field with broad prospects. At present, meat-and-bone meal contamination and declining fishmeal production have also provided an opportunity for the industrial development of feed insects.
1. Yellow mealworm: in its larvae, pupae, and adults, protein content is 51%, 57%, and 61% respectively. It is both an excellent fine feed for livestock and poultry and a top-grade feed for raising scorpions, snakes, centipedes, soft-shelled turtles, etc. The method of artificially breeding yellow mealworms is simple, and every household can breed them.
2. Fly maggot powder: using rice bran, wheat bran, pig manure, crushed bones, and brown (white) sugar as raw materials, fly maggots can be bred quickly. Live fly maggots can be used directly to feed chickens, ducks, and geese. Processed into fly maggot powder, they can feed pigs and aquatic products, etc. Fly maggot powder contains about 68% protein, superior to earthworm powder. Adding 12%-20% to livestock and poultry feed can improve palatability and benefit eating.
3. Silkworm pupa powder: the silkworm pupae left after silk is reeled from cocoons are deodorized, dried, defatted, dried again, and crushed to make silkworm pupa powder. Its protein content is as high as over 70%, exceeding high-quality imported fishmeal. It is extremely effective for feeding livestock and poultry, bullfrogs, forest frogs, shrimp and crabs, etc.
4. Dried cockroach: protein content is 60%-70%, and it has a good feeding-attractant effect on fish.
5. Rice grasshopper powder: locusts made into dry powder have a protein content of 64%, low fat content, and an amino acid content as high as 16 grams per 100 grams. It is a high-quality insect feed that can replace fishmeal.
6. Other insects: moths, scarab beetles, etc. that fish and poultry like to eat all have very high protein content. In summer and autumn, if a black light lamp or a 100-watt bulb is installed at a fish pond or in woods, 2 meters above the ground, with a basin of water placed under the lamp and a few drops of cooking oil dripped on the water surface, large numbers of insects such as moths and scarab beetles can be captured every night and used directly to feed fish and chickens, ducks, geese, etc.