Insect Farming for Food and Feed is not recommended as a climate solution because it offers minimal opportunities for GHG reductions and has significant down sides.
For cost and emissions, I think the nascent field hasn’t matured correctly.
The insect farms I see are farms out in rural areas where they truck in feed and truck out protein. A better model would be urban light industrial, where a city can divert grocery store spoiled vegetables to the urban insect farm. Just a few collection points and short distance for big payloads of human food grade waste. Perfect for hungry insects. Easy for an EV truck to do.
Passive house style building with photovoltaics reduces emissions to nearly nil. Insects grown can be processed on site into powders, then further onto food processors with minimal transportation because the entire supply chain is local, and its a waste stream being converted to productive use.
The rural areas are where you run-into the least NIMBY-ism, full-stop. Insect Protein still has a rep in the food and high-brow agriculture world akin to Nuclear Energy or Strip-Mining.
For cost and emissions, I think the nascent field hasn’t matured correctly.
The insect farms I see are farms out in rural areas where they truck in feed and truck out protein. A better model would be urban light industrial, where a city can divert grocery store spoiled vegetables to the urban insect farm. Just a few collection points and short distance for big payloads of human food grade waste. Perfect for hungry insects. Easy for an EV truck to do.
Passive house style building with photovoltaics reduces emissions to nearly nil. Insects grown can be processed on site into powders, then further onto food processors with minimal transportation because the entire supply chain is local, and its a waste stream being converted to productive use.
The rural areas are where you run-into the least NIMBY-ism, full-stop. Insect Protein still has a rep in the food and high-brow agriculture world akin to Nuclear Energy or Strip-Mining.
Oh, well if there is nimbyism at play we should just all lie down and accept our fate.
… or just build the stuff where it can be built? Rural≠“Useful for Agriculture”, it really doesn’t.