Professor, Entomology, University of Thessaly, Greece
Insect farming is an area that is still unexplored on the basis of the production of food and feed. At the same time, there four certain priorities that are related with the expansion of the use of insects for waste management. First, insects are ideal consumers of agricultural side-streams and byproducts, with superior feed conversion ratio, as compared with conventional diets. Second, insect breeding has been regarded as a critical issue, as there are certain strains and populations that are more productive than others, in terms of longevity, fecundity, protein content and other qualitative characteristics. Third, the use of insects as feed should be expanded to other groups of animals, such as ruminants; the same holds in the case of specific insect products, such as insect oil, chitin, chitosan etc. Finally, there are insect byproducts, such as frass, that can be evolved to wide-range fertilizers, adding one more paradigm in the circular economy aspect of insect farming. Based on the above, there are plenty of things that have to be done at the legislative level, but also towards the consumers’ acceptance at the multi-trophic level.
