Eat a Bug, Save the World: Sustainable Insect Farming

Global Orphan Foundation has been talking about insect farming for quite some time now. We’ve praised their nutritional benefits, shared countless photos, and passed out dried crickets to those who are daring enough to try them. Today, it’s all about the sustainability aspect of farming these tasty treats. Let’s get started.

Palm weevil larva feeding on sugar cane

Livestock burp and pass gas at an excessive rate by human standards. When they do, cattle, sheep, and goats emit enormous amounts of methane gas and nitrous oxide into the atmosphere, exacerbating the climate crisis. But it’s not their manners that are to blame, it’s our farming practices. Traditional farming practices demand enormous amounts of valuable resources like land, water, and energy while emitting vast quantities of greenhouse gases. 

So, if we’re going to beat the climate crisis, we need to feed the world more efficiently and cut the harmful, and stinky, by-products. That’s one reason why, in 2013, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN began studying and advocating entomophagy. Simply put, the UN said, “eat bugs.”

Child from Boboto Orphanage eating palm weevil larva in DR Congo

As the world’s population grows, the amount of farmable land, healthy fisheries, clean water, and available energy shrinks. Using traditional farming methods, it takes about 1,799 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef and 576 gallons of water for one pound of pork. That’s a TON of water. Literally. 

The FAO estimates that each year over 32 billion acres of forest are converted to pastures for livestock to graze or cropland for farmers to cultivate. Lost forest area means less water availability, degraded soil fertility, and diminished biodiversity. 

These protein sources require vast amounts of water and land, but they also emit more greenhouse gasses than all the cars on the road in the entire world each year. 

All of this leads to the UN saying, ‘let’s farm insects.’ Farming and eating insects may not sound appealing to you, but those creepy crawlies are already feeding mouths across the world. Insects have an established place in the food culture of at least 2 billion people worldwide who consume 1,900 different types of insects, from long-horned beetles in the Amazon Basin to crickets in Thailand.

Palm weevil larva

Insect farming has a huge upside for the planet – they convert the food they consume to a protein we can eat more efficiently than traditional livestock. Six times more efficiently than cattle and two times as efficiently as pigs and chickens. That saves land, water, and energy and cuts greenhouse gas emissions by a factor of 100. 

That’s one of the reasons why Global Orphan Foundation is such a fan of insect farming. Another is that in Kinshasa, where the population density is double that of New York City, land is at a premium for people, let alone livestock. GOF uses insect farming to feed more mouths, more efficiently, using less land and fewer resources. 

800 sq. feet insect farming building at Bolingo Village in Democratic Republic of Congo.

Bolingo Village is home to an 800 square foot insect farm building, where we farm palm weevil larva. We’re growing and expanding to fill this building to capacity, at which point we will be able to sell our product as a means to support village operations. We also have plans to hold trainings here, where Kinshasa orphanages will be able to learn how to farm their own insects as a way to financially support and feed the children in their care. 

While insect farming is still in its early stages in most of the developed world, it represents an opportunity to drastically alter the trajectory of an impending food crisis. The edible insect industry is projected to be worth $8 billion by the year 2030.  Like it or not, it’s time for us all to get a little more comfortable with the idea of eating bugs.