MAYSVILLE, Ky. – Can bugs feed the world? EnviroFlight (R) thinks so.

EnviroFlight is the first black soldier fly (BSF) commercial facility in the United States, said Carrie Kuball, the company’s vice president of sales and marketing. The EnviroFlight uses the BSF larvae to produce protein for animal feed and pet food.

“BSFs are native to all continents except Antarctica,” Kuball said. “They are not pests. They don’t bite or carry disease. You will find them typically in the summer in your compost piles. They don’t buzz. They don’t fly fast; they kind of fly lazily or float around.”

BSFs are pollinators, Kuball said. As flies, they’ll be in the garden around flowers. In the larval stage, they’re in compost in the wild.

“They are always eaten in the larval stage as well,” Kuball said. “Chickens are a great example. When you see chickens out scratching in compost or in the yard, they are looking for little grub-type insects in the ground and that is what the black soldier fly larva is. They are a natural food item to a lot of animals.”

EnviroFlight chose to use BSFs because they grow rapidly and don’t require a lot of space. They can raise them in vertically stacked trays on a small footprint of land.

“That gives us the ability to raise a lot of insects in a relatively small amount of space,” Kuball said. “From egg to larval stage they can be commercially raised in as little as 15 to 20 days.”

The larvae dine on food manufacturers’ leftover by-products, including, since the company is in the middle of bourbon country, distillers grains, all of which is keeping food waste out of landfills. Once the larvae have reached the right size and age, the company processes them by heat drying. They can be sold whole, as dried larvae, or processed into a high protein meal or oil product.

“We produce those three ingredients and we sell those three ingredients to manufacturers and pet food companies,” Kuball said. “Right now we have about 70 employees and that number has more than doubled in the last two years. We’re rapidly growing. Part of that is because we just opened the commercial facility a few years ago, part of it is because of the interest in the United States for the insect industry.”

It’s only recently that an insect ingredient has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for use in animal feed. That started with aqua culture, then poultry, and now swine and pet food. EnviroFlight has led the industry in producing the data that’s required to prove that black soldier fly ingredients are safe and effective for animal feeds.

EnviroFlight opened a pilot plant in 2008 in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and the first commercial facility in 2019 in Kentucky. They have a new research and development center and corporate office opening in North Carolina this summer.

“Harnessing the power of the fly will help us feed the animals that will ultimately feed our rapidly growing population,” said the company’s webpage.

For information, visit www.enviroflight.net.