Fly Farm Creates Animal Feed From Blood, Guts and Excrement

A fly factory in South Africa is generating quite a buzz for its ability to create natural animal feed from biological waste.

The factory collects manure, blood, guts and discarded food and lets flies loose. The winged insects lay eggs on the piles of waste, which then hatch into larvae, which eat the waste. Once fattened, that larvae are collected and processed into animal feed with purportedly as good a nutritional composition as fishmeal and better than Soya, another common animal feed, according to AgriProtien Technologies, the company behind the fly factory.

The company is calling their factory the first industrial farming operation for flies.

"We take food from food factories, we take blood and guts from slaughter house, we take animal poo from concentrated farming operations and we use different species of fly to eat and combine those wastes," said AgriProtien's Jason Drew, according to Discovery News.

"We might not think those are attractive things but flies love that sort of stuff. It's what nature invented the fly for -- to recycle that protein."

And the Stellenbosch, South Africa, factory is now attracting a lot more than flies.

The firm has interest from almost 30 countries that want to license their technology.

And it recently bested 900 applicants to win the $100,000 Innovation Prize for Africa, which is a joint initiative of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and the African Innovation Foundation.

The factory has favorable output ratios.  A single female fly will lay 750 eggs in under a week, which will hatch into larvae which grow in weight over 400 times in just a few days. At the end of 72 hours, one kilo of eggs turns into about 380 kilos of larvae, said Drew.

Drew said that in the future this form of waste recycling will be commonplace, like traditional recycling in today.

"Within 10 years from now, we will consider it normal to recycle our waste nutrients."