INTERVIEW 48 Alternative Proteins Magazine April 2025 My vision of insect farming is not that it's starting to push out mainstream agriculture, but it more comes alongside it and helps to support it, as well as provide new revenue opportunities and new ways in which you can create value. A great example is that a farmer can have a container where they're farming black soldier fly and feeding them with organic byproducts from their own activities, and then feeding the larvae in a live state to their poultry. That’s really good for the poultry from a behavioral as well as health perspective. So, think that the traditional livestock sector and insect protein sector can go hand in hand, and I hope that they will. I recognize that there are growing concerns about the environmental footprint of livestock farming, but I know the sector is actively looking at what can be done to improve that. A part of that is what the livestock are fed on, as the methane emissions that come from livestock production are partly affected by their diet. So, I think we need to work together. The sector is at a stage where companies are looking to their own products and their own niche market. What I think we could be doing is joining hands more across these sectors. For example, if you have a restaurant chain that’s making a beef-based product, and you want to reduce your environmental footprint, instead of using 100 percent beef it could be just 80 percent with 20 percent insect material. It would not only enhance the flavour, but also reduce the carbon footprint, and keep the beef operation. So, I think there's lots of ways we can coexist and work in partnership with mainstream farming, as part of a general drive to improve the world. Though that transition has to be managed very carefully, and I think we need to maintain our focus on the environment. We need to find ways of taking everything together: We need to take the farming community with us as we go on the journey towards a more sustainable future. UKEIA is preparing for the Nest 1.0 conference set to take place in late April. Finally, can you tell us a bit about the conference and its importance for the insect protein industry? Absolutely. NEST 1.0, which we expect to be running as a series, is going to be a business-to-business event, not an academic conference. It's going to be hosted by Nottingham University Food Sciences Campus on the 24th and 25th of April. We’re going to have a mix of business success stories, panel discussions, practical workshops, lab visits, and a substantial exhibition. We’re also going to allow a lot of time for networking and collaboration. Some of the topics we're going to cover are going to be about how the national supermarkets are embracing farmed insect protein in their waste strategies, how to get the necessary certifications for insect farming. There is going to be an exhibition of different insect farming and food companies, and there'll be a lunchtime buffet which will include edible insect products to sample from some of our members. Finally, with exclusive briefings on the latest funding from Government and NAPIC, it will be extremely good value. You can register through our Eventbrite page or you can see further the details on our own website. About Dr. Nick Rousseau Dr. Nick Rousseau is the founder of UKEIA, and has worked consistently over many years to support more sustainable food solutions – in 2009 he founded a local food growing cooperative and ran it for 5 years before working in the Sheffield Junk Food Project. In 2015 he founded the Woven Network CIC – UK’s (international) network focused on supporting entrepreneurs and researchers working on the opportunities around insects for food and feed. As a result of his work with Woven, Rousseau has built an extensive international network of people involved in insect farming and gained a broad understanding of the many issues facing the sector and the opportunities that insect farming offers. He has been asked to speak about the potential of insect protein in the Houses of Parliament, at a policy think-tank event on the future of food and at academic and business conferences. He holds BA, MSc and PhD degrees in psychology from the universities of Cambridge, Loughborough and Sheffield with a focus on psychology and user-centred system design.
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