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France: The world’s largest insect farm will grow hundreds of millions of beetles—for eating

In France, the new farm will supply a low-carbon source of protein for pet food, fertilizer, and fish feed, replacing land-intensive options such as soy or cows.

By Adele Peters
Fast Company
Oct 6, 2020

Excerpt:

On a sprawling site an hour north of Paris in the French city of Amiens, a new vertical farm now under construction won’t be growing lettuce or vegetables. Instead, it will soon begin raising hundreds of millions of insects. Inside, in trays stacked under 130-foot-high ceilings, an automated system will grow and process beetle larvae for use in products such as pet food, fertilizer, and fish feed, as a way to dramatically shrink their environmental footprints.

Ÿnsect, the company building the new facility, announced today that it had extended its Series C round of financing to $372 million, the largest amount raised to date in the insect protein sector, an industry that essentially didn’t exist a decade ago. The company launched in 2011 “to contribute to a more sustainable food system,” says Antoine Hubert, Ÿnsect’s cofounder, president, and CEO.

“We know that with a growing population, and the limited resources we have on Earth, limited arable land, the maximum greenhouse gas emissions that we can afford with climate change, and biodiversity loss, there’s so much to do.”

By 2050, it’s projected that food production will have to grow by more than 70% to meet demand, but the farmland needed to produce that food doesn’t exist. Clearing more forests for farming, at a time when trees are a critical part of the fight against climate change, also doesn’t make sense. Foods that don’t require land for production—for instance, salmon, which is now consumed at three times the rate that it was in the 1980s—put other stresses on the environment.

Read the complete article here.