Flybox co-founder and CEO Andrea Jagodic talks fly larvae as animal feed - and what environmental benefits it could offer to UK farming.
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00:00 - Hi, I'm Andrea Jagodic, I'm the CEO
00:02 and co-founder of Flybox.
00:04 The whole principle behind insect farming
00:07 is imitating the natural process
00:12 to get nutrients out of waste.
00:15 So we feed the black soldier fly larvae organic waste,
00:20 and then we harvest them for protein for animal feed,
00:24 primarily for fish, poultry, and pigs and pet food.
00:30 What we do at Flybox is we do containerized insect farms,
00:35 like you've seen for lettuce or basil before,
00:39 now it's just full of insects.
00:41 In Aylesbury right now in Buckinghamshire,
00:43 we're building a demonstrator farm.
00:45 So that's going to be really the world first
00:48 end-to-end modular insect farm.
00:51 This is where we have all of the modules demonstrated,
00:56 and it is on a commercial layer hand farm,
00:58 so we can already see how it integrates
01:01 into a farm as well.
01:02 The main environmental benefits,
01:04 the way that we look at them are just lowering land use,
01:09 water use, CO2 emissions.
01:11 These insects are not a pest,
01:14 they're not a vector for disease.
01:16 They're extremely safe and natural
01:19 to integrate into the food chain.
01:22 Someone told me growing up
01:25 that I would be perfectly happy putting my hands
01:29 into a giant box of wriggling larvae.
01:34 I would never have believed them ever.
01:37 So I understand it,
01:39 but it's about the fact that we're completely disassociated
01:43 from the farming process as a whole.
01:46 So that's just the reality of it.
01:48 What we're doing is feeding these animals
01:51 what they're supposed to be eating,
01:53 and that's all essentially.
01:55 So I think it's not really that insect specific,
01:58 we just don't want to accept the realities
02:01 of how our food gets to our table, I think.
02:03 We have so much market interest for this technology
02:07 from New Zealand to South America,
02:11 to North America, to the whole world.
02:13 And the mission here is to enable access to protein
02:18 to anyone who needs it,
02:20 because the mission is, broader mission or ambition
02:24 is to help feed the growing population.