From Pest to Protein: Feeding Livestock With Flies Drawn to Their Farms

“Humans have harvested wild insects since, well, before being Homo sapiens,” says Lee Cohnstaedt, Ph.D., a research entomologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS). “People in much of the world moved away from eating insects because of animal agriculture, and now we will have to return to insects as food and feed because there are too many people for traditional livestock agriculture to support.” Fortunately, Cohnstaedt points out, wild insects are often quite attracted to intensive agriculture settings—thereby making mass harvesting possible.

The study used a newly designed mass-collection trapping device called the USDA Biomass Harvest Trap (USDA-BHT), specifically tailored to gather large amounts of insects from agricultural settings without significantly affecting beneficial insect populations.

The scientists deliberately chose agricultural settings for the study because these environments often exhibit an imbalance in diversity, predominantly harboring altered and artificial communities. Their harvest primarily comprised species from these modified ecosystems and contained no beneficial or endangered species. Instead, they almost exclusively captured house flies, as well as some stable flies, blow flies, and carrion beetles. The trap also seemed to allure a community of toads, frogs, and spiders that lingered nearby, capturing whatever flies evaded collection efforts. But the trap never endangered any other species.

However, this study was intended to tee up additional research into steps that follow trapping in the larger process of developing wild-caught insects into livestock feed. The research was a part of a larger “Grand Challenge” research initiative at the USDA, called MINIstock (Model for Insect Inclusion), which knits together expertise from 48 scientists nationwide to pursue sustainable, circular agriculture solutions with insects as food and feed.

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