How to train an insect farmer
A lot of people ask me if I know what I am doing in this new world of farming insects.
Truth be told, I don’t know that much and I'm winging 80% of life right now, if you excuse the pun. I come from a dairy farming background where you can reasonably learn from the 7,850 established UK dairy farms. Amazingly, I can count on two hands all the people doing what I'm doing in the UK right now. It also isn’t like working for a start-up in the city, where the principles are the same, but you still have people around you solving problems with you.
In a nascent industry which attracts the attention of venture capitalist investment, there is perhaps an attitude that supports the first-mover advantage narrative. Whereby the company that grows bigger and faster than the others is acknowledged to “win”. This breeds a mindset geared around secrecy of intellectual property within the existing players. This makes knowledge sharing and learning quite a closed book, so being able to learn my trade has proven a tricky problem indeed.
Rather than getting anxious knowing just 20% of what I'm doing. I have had to focus on what I can control. For example, I have read many a scholarly article, I have tried to speak to as many people as possible in the hope that 1% will share their wisdom and I have even spent hours, no days(!), on YouTube watching videos of how Kenyans or Indonesians rear black soldier flies. It still baffles me that, in August, I applied for a PhD on the topic of commercial insect rearing techniques. Something I never thought I’d even consider!
Then the training gods extended to me a hand. I recently attended an insect rearing course in The Netherlands, organised by New Generation Nutrition (NGN). It was a fantastic course that I learnt a lot from. It acted as validation for many of my planning assumptions and estimations. I connected a lot of hazy nodes in my brain-plan. Most valuably, it opened up my network in Europe. Some of the topics covered were:
- Practical farm and supplier visits in The Netherlands
- Key rearing theory & background
- Essential rearing techniques & inputs
- Business case insights
Fly2Feed founder, David, with his training cohort at NGN, Netherlands
Thanks go to Chantal van Wylick for organising, Marian Peters for leading and the rest of the team for supporting. I hope to see you again soon!
