Feed & Additive Magazine Issue 2 March 2021

SPECIAL STORY 54 FEED & ADDITIVE MAGAZINE March 2021 agribusiness giant Cargill has long supported insect production, restating their interest in the sector in 2020, and highlighting insects as ‘the most promis- ing novel ingredient currently on the market’. In the last three years, BSF in particular has raised a lot of attention from academia. We can easily see in the graph that in 2018 alone, more papers were pub- lished than the sum of the previous 70 years (1947 - 2017) of scientific research. And although the majority of these papers focused on aquafeed applications, there is growing evidence that the application of insect meal and insect oil in other livestock has significant advantages too. In broilers it has been reported that the insect meal can boost the immune system (Lee et al., 2018), im- prove the animal performance (Moula et al., 2018) and the gut health (Biasato et al., 2018); as well as being a sustainable source of highly digestible protein to replace the soybean meal (Schiavione et al., 2019). Last year, Star et al. (2000) published an interesting paper where they fed live larvae to laying hens, and ob- served an improvement in the well-being of the treated flock. Even with relatively modest inclusion levels, it was also reported that insect meal can improve the feed intake of piglets (Biasato et al., 2019) likely due to an improvement on the attractiveness of their feed. RECENT TRENDS / FUNDING / DEVELOPMENTS WITHIN THE SECTOR Large scale insect production is new technology for human society, and as such requires (and creates) tech- nological breakthroughs. Research and development in the insect industry has so far largely focused on life his- tory traits and bioconversion parameters such as nu- tritional requirements, as these are poorly understood relative to other species. However, as the sector matures research activities are increasingly including a broad range of disciplines and technologies. One clear trend is an emphasis on selective breeding and genomics. In November of 2019 two separate scientific teams, one of researchers based in China and one private com- pany in South Africa, announced they had sequenced the Black Soldier Fly genome. The researchers from China went further by using a CRISPR/Cas9-based genome editing technique to produce genetically en- gineered insects. However, most companies in the sec- tor are pursuing more traditional means of optimising Source: Tomberlin & van Huis 2020 – Historical use of BSF at feed industry * Web of Science search made on Dec 14th, 2020