Feeding cattle with flies: Quebec university students win prize in Mexico

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Two Quebec university students and a biologist won first prize at an international event for a project that uses black soldier fly larvae to dispose of waste and produce animal feed.

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Mariève Dallaire-Lamontagne and Jean-Michel Allard-Prus, students in the department of animal sciences at Université Laval, and the biologist Jérémy Lavoie won the Youth Innovation Challenge 2022 presented in Mexico by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, a trilateral group in which Canada, the United States and Mexico participate. Canadian Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault was in attendance.

The Quebec group’s winning project, Inscott, breeds black soldier fly larvae to eat farm waste such as carcasses, a type of waste that is difficult to dispose of and requires a lot of energy. The larvae, which are an excellent source of protein, are then used as food for animals which, when killed, serve as food for the larvae. The process creates a circular economy.

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“What we are proposing is to improve the way we manage our animal waste here in Quebec and in Canada, using the potential of edible insects,” Dallaire-Lamontagne said in an interview from Mexico.

“So we are talking about livestock waste like carcasses, offal, manure, eggs.”

After two weeks fed on this waste, the fly larvae “can be integrated into the diet of livestock such as chickens or pigs,” he said, “but they can also be used to feed domestic animals such as dogs or cats.”

Dallaire-Lamontagne, a master’s student, said fly-based foods are less harmful to the environment than “conventional sources of protein, like soy or fishmeal, for example, which are associated with ecological problems.”

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The agricultural sector generates large amounts of uneaten protein made up of things like brains, bones, intestines, and bones. The traditional process for processing waste from dead animals is called rendering and converts the leftovers into protein for animal feed.

However, Allard-Prus said that the traditional process requires “an enormous amount of energy to heat all the biomass,” while the system developed with Dallaire-Lamontagne uses the digestive system of the larvae, and that consumes few resources, space or Energy.

Guilbault said the next step for the Quebec trio is to try to market Inscott.

“The animal waste that we are addressing as part of this project is a problem as we have to use large amounts of energy to burn these animal carcasses,” he said.

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“So finding an alternative solution based on the teachings of nature fits perfectly with the type of projects we are trying to foster here (at the CEC meeting).”

The 2022 Youth Innovation Challenge invited 18-30 year olds from North America to come up with innovative and concrete solutions to “help communities recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and determine the intersection point between human health and environment”.

“We have all been able to see the fragility of food supply chains during the pandemic,” Lavoie said, adding that he and the two students want to “give a little more control back to communities and cities” to “produce protein from quality”. , then treat animal waste locally and efficiently.”

The Youth Innovation Challenge 2022 also awarded a team of young American entrepreneurs and a team of young Mexicans.

Each of the three winning teams will receive up to $15,000 in business start-up funds, as well as benefit from mentoring for a year.