Saturday, June 25, 2022

Sustainable farm in the desert

This ingenious farmer wanted to raise chickens in an off-grid desert farm simply and sustainably, using only garbage  – black soldier fly larvae consume food waste and yield high-protein feed for chickens without requiring water.

7:02 [We first tried] "worms to feed the hens but the hens ate so many worms and you just can't breed them fast enough - you just can't keep up. So we went to the black soldier fly, because it's so prolific and so abundant and it only took us one or two cycles to get to this [abundance] right and now the breeding is like clockwork."



https://youtu.be/u34T06JOMp8

In addition, the waste is useful as fertilizer:

11:19 "their frass which is the fancy word we give to insect poop if you introduce it to plants in their starter stages it contains an enzyme that tells the plants that there are insects present when [in fact] there aren't any so the plant will protect itself from the inside out it grows stronger thicker cell walls that makes it less hospitable to insects so we find in our gardens that we have many many fewer insect issues and fewer disease issues if we introduce insect frass into the seed starter mix so as a byproduct of that…Our plants will protect themselves from the inside out and so I don't have to use chemical Idon't use pesticides there's no herbicides there's no commercial fertilizer used in our garden at all."

16:22 - he circulates ambient air into an underground chamber that cools his greenhouse during the day by 20-30 degrees, and warms it at night by the same margin, allowing him to grow tropical plants year 'round without burning fossil fuels.  

He's in a suburb of Phoenix. 

Arizona Worm Farm:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/11pdMU3tMczS8xQn9

Here's an African agribusiness growing soldier flies from pig manure:

1:50 in a circular economy, turning pig manure (and other waste) into protein for feeding pigs 
4:20 The amount of resource required to grow the protein is much lower than other protein sources for feeding pigs and chickens. 

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