09/17/07 Unusual Food Chain

Unusual Food Chain. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. When I first heard about this next story I wasn't really interested and then the more I talked with Sophie St. Hillaire, the more I was fascinated. It seems in the natural world, there is an incredible food chain. There is no waste; in fact, waste is what we are talking about. Scientists from the University of Idaho and Idaho State University have gone from one discovery to another. It seems that flies like to eat manure. To be more specific, black soldier fly larvae do the eating. They consume a lot. But why are scientists watching flies eat&uh&waste? That's where Sophie St. Hillaire, an aquatic species veterinarian, comes in. ST. HILLAIRE: We wanted to see if the fish would eat this protein and fat source and so it turns out that the black soldier fly converts manure into about 40% protein and 30% fat and se we've seen that the fish do take the fly when it's incorporated into their feed and we can replace about 25% of their fish meal with it. The larvae eat the manure and the fish eat the larvae. But wait, there's more. ST. HILLAIRE: So now what we are trying to do is to improve the fat content of the fly so that it looks more like fish and it turns out that Idaho has a lot of fish offal from their fish processing plants so we're trying to recycle that and they actually incorporate those omega-3 fatty acids into their profile. So now we have healthy fly larvae being used as nutritious fish food as a result of recycling cow manure and left-over fish bits from processing plants. But wait, there's one more. ST. HILLAIRE: If the waste is wet, they really don't like to stay in there if they're not feeding anymore so they actually migrate out and we use that behavior of the pre-pupae to collect them in a fairly economical way. They actually self-harvest themselves. See what I mean? Given the subject matter, this is actually fascinating. The flies can reduce the manure by as much as 40%. And since the flies remain in the larval stage, they aren't buzzing around. As for taking this whole process out of the lab and into larger scale operations, St. Hillaire says they are gearing up to that end. ST. HILLAIRE: Next summer we plan on doing a small pilot trial on a larger scale where we're looking at perhaps a ton of maggots. Right now we're working with like a hundred pounds or so in the laboratory. Next summer will be the trial to tell us whether or not we're able to do this on a larger scale on the farm itself. Might be the beginning of a whole new industry. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.