Grant: Alliance Grants

Food security is a global concern and Canada's current agricultural model is not adequately positioned to support our growing needs. Insects are nutritious, protein rich, and their production requires less resources than vertebrate protein sources. Demand for insects as food and feed is rapidly rising in North America. A primary goal of our Alliance project is to increase yield (the number of crickets harvested per unit area and/or time). Cricket farms struggle with how best to increase yield to meet demand as it is difficult to disentangle the effects of the highly variable farm environment (e.g., temperature and humidity fluctuations, pests, personnel changes) from controlled variables like diet composition. Together with Entomo Farms, we have identified key concerns surrounding increasing yield that cannot be addressed without our support. We will use our laboratory environment to determine how to best manipulate diet content (Goal 1) and environmental context (Goal 2) to improve rearing facilities and practices. We will then test our findings directly at Entomo Farms (Goal 3). Specifically, we will identify the protein to carbohydrate ratio and lipid to phosphorus to vitamin C ratio, along with the ideal plant-based protein and the optimal dietary particle size required to maximize yield. Insect growth is also heavily influenced by temperature, and since temperature sensitivity of physiological systems can differ, the effects of temperature will depend on diet. We will thus determine how diet and temperature interact to impact yield. Further, because Entomo Farm's rearing practices create a complex social environment with resource competition produced through density, we will also determine the effect of rearing density and diet on growth and survival in our controlled laboratory setting. To scale findings up to the active farm environment, the top diet formulations from Goals 1&2 will be tested at Entomo Farms to ensure yields increase. This will enable the company to confirm our findings scale to the complex farm environment, prior to Entomo tweaking the approaches used on their entire production line. Our goal is to ensure Entomo's yield is increased by at least 25% to meet growing demand for their products and contribute to global food security.