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VIDEO: Singapore’s Urban Farmers Seek High-Tech Solutions To Turn Waste Into Resources
With the challenges of climate change and a growing population, research and development have become critical in helping overcome threats to sustainability with the help of technology
MAY 11, 2021
KEY POINTS
Singapore’s first urban insect farm, Insectta, is a biotech start-up extracting valuable biomaterials from the black soldier fly.
With the challenges of climate change and a growing population, research and development have Nessa Anwar become critical in helping overcome threats to sustainability with the help of technology.
Farmers in typically traditional environments are also tapping into technology to bring added value to their fields of specialty, such as Singapore fish farm Eco-Ark.
Farmers are popping up in major cities - here’s why
SINGAPORE — Thousands of wriggling larvae won’t deter this self-declared “urban farmer.”
Chua Kai-Ning is one of the founders of Singapore’s first urban insect farm, Insectta — a high-tech farm that rears the black soldier fly to help turn food waste into biomaterials for industrial use.
“The black soldier fly is a way to contribute to what we call the circular economy, where we produce things without anything going to waste,” said the 26-year-old, who has a background in English linguistics.
Some in Singapore are turning to urban farming in this land-scarce city, as they look for high-tech ways to turn waste into useful resources.
Chua is one of them.
We are not only reimagining what we farm, but what we get out of the farming process.
Chua Kai-Ning
CO-FOUNDER, INSECTTA
“Their superpower is their ability to consume food waste,” she said of the black soldier fly, regularly scooping up a handful of writhing insects with her bare hands throughout the farm visit.
“A kilo of larvae can go through four kilograms of waste in just 24 hours,” she said, explaining that pre-consumer food waste — primarily soybean leftovers and spent grain from the beer-brewing industry — is fed to the larvae.
But the work doesn’t stop there.
Insectta’s co-founder and chief technology officer Phua Jun Wei demonstrating water-soluble melanin derived from their black soldier fly larvae.
From the insect farm, the trays of larvae are transported to a laboratory on the other side of the island state. There, biomaterials are extracted from the larvae and used to produce valuable substances for electronics, pharmaceuticals, and cosmetics, such as chitosan and melanin.
The future of urban agriculture, Chua maintained, is in deep technology. Deep tech companies are often start-ups founded on scientific and engineering breakthroughs, aimed at harnessing technology to address environmental or societal challenges.
“We are not only reimagining what we farm but what we get out of the farming process.”
Pioneers such as Insectta are not the only ones coming up with high-tech ways of farming to cater to a world with evolving needs. Farmers in typically traditional environments are also tapping into technology to bring added value to their fields of specialty.
Eco-Ark is one such example. The closed-containment floating fish farm located in the eastern side of Singapore uses seawater that has been optimally treated to farm fish.
The farm — an area slightly smaller than two basketball courts — also uses green energy tapped from its solar roof to power about 20% of its farming activities, the company said.
The Eco-Ark is a closed-containment floating fish farm located off a Singapore coast, yielding more than 160 tonnes of fish a year.
“We produce our own oxygen, we produce our own ozone,” said Leow Ban Tat, CEO of Aquaculture Centre of Excellence, which built Eco-Ark.
Open-net fish farms are vulnerable to environmental threats such as plankton blooms, oil spills and warmer waters due to climate change. Unlike these traditional farms, fish on the Eco-Ark are contained in seawater that is filtered and treated to kill pathogens.
“As fish grow, they produce a lot of ammonia and nitrates,” he explained, adding that water discharged back to the sea is treated and free of waste.
In addition to a water filtration system that improves the mortality of fish reared, the high-tech floating farm is the first in the country to have post-harvest facilities, said Leow.
After cleaning and preparing ready-made fish for consumption, the fish bones and fish heads left behind are turned into pellets that can be used as plant fertilizer, ensuring no unnecessary waste.
Singapore sets its sights on high-tech farming
Traditionally, urban farms are not known to be energy efficient. Critics say that growing food with the help of high-tech systems to boost artificial farming environments, such as in climate control, raises energy costs.
With the challenges of climate change and a growing population, research and development have become critical to overcoming threats to sustainability with the help of technology.
In its latest budget, Singapore set aside 60 million Singapore dollars (about $45.2 million) to encourage farmers to utilize technology. The Agri-Food Cluster Transformation Fund was established in February to help farmers better apply technology to local food production.
The goal of sustainability has drawn people like aquaculturist Nick Goh to fish farms like Eco-Ark.
“This is actually what I wanted to do. It is not sustainable if we keep on doing fish-netting outside, fishing, fish trawling,” he told CNBC. “So if we have aquaculture in the field, we can actually first sustain the ocean, and second, sustain ourselves in terms of food security-wise.”
Black soldier fly larvae eating through a tray of pre-consumer food waste.
Insectta’s Chua admits it’s not been easy.
“Pioneering anything, especially in a deep tech industry, is definitely scary,” Chua said. “But it’s also empowering because you know that you’re the first mover for change.”
“If we don’t go out there and look for new solutions to current problems such as the food waste crisis, dwindling natural resources, we’re never going to make any headway.”
VIDEO: With Backing From Hollywood, French Startup Ÿnsect Plans To Bring Edible Insects To America
After decades of squeamishness, we might finally be ready to allow creepy-crawlies into our food supply chain. Bugs, it seems, are having a moment
BY VIVIENNE WALT
October 12, 2020
This Startup Wants to Fix the Bug in the Food Chain Ÿnsect will supply livestock farmers with powder made from insects.
With the pandemic changing age-old consumer habits, there might be one more taboo headed for extinction: Edible insects.
After decades of squeamishness, we might finally be ready to allow creepy-crawlies into our food supply chain. Bugs, it seems, are having a moment. Last week (just a day before a fly gained global fame during the Vice-Presidential debate) the French insect-farming startup Ÿnsect announced it had raised $372 million, hugely ramping up the niche industry, and accelerating the company’s plans for large-scale production in the U.S. The investments even had a touch of Hollywood stardom: Robert Downey Jr.’s eco-focused FootPrint Coalition invested $224 million in debt and equity into the startup.
“I dig it,” Downey said on the fund’s site, announcing his investment in the company with the inevitable insect pun. “Ÿnsect’s process produces no waste and complies with the U.N.’s sustainability goals.”
Indeed, the dire squeeze on the world’s land and oceans makes a strong case for farming insects. About 26% of the Earth’s arable land is used to graze animals, according to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, or FAO, and at least one-third of all the crops grown are devoted to manufacturing animal feed, a $500-billion-a year industry, which relies on staples like soybeans and corn, which are far lower in protein than simple insects, and far more expensive to grow. The oceans fare no better: About 22 million tons of fish caught in the wild in 2018 were ground up for fish meal, rather than served to humans, according to FAO statistics.
Even so, it has taken years for Ÿnsect to win over the industry. “Three years ago, we were more pushing and advocating our technology,” says CEO and co-founder Antoine Hubert, who launched the company in 2011. The shift appeared to begin with the pandemic, as the world languished through months of lockdown, sending global supply chains into disarray. “In the past few months, more companies are coming to us,” Hubert says. “Agricultural companies want to aggregate their waste.”
High in protein
The contrast with Big Ag could hardly be starker. Ÿnsect breeds the larvae of the Tenebrio Molitor beetle inside a vertical factory, which Hubert opened in 2016, in a modest-sized industrial building in Dole, a town in eastern France near the Swiss border. When Fortune visited the factory in 2018, we watched conveyor belts with trays containing millions of squirming mealworms, all fed with agricultural waste collected from the area's farms. From that, Ÿnsect produces high-protein pet food and livestock feed—all without using a single acre of land or hauling fish from the ocean. Ÿnsect believes it will take time for we humans (at least in Western countries) to feel comfortable eating insects themselves. But until we do, bugs are likely to become a growing, key part of the meat, chicken, and fish we eat.
Hubert says Ÿnsect has signed about $105 million worth of contracts with feed and fertilizer companies. He claims the company has raised a total of about $425 million in investments, more than the funding of all his insect-farming startup competitors combined, including Canada's Enterra. But big money is flowing in from established players as well. In January, NYSE-listed Darling Ingredients acquired a 100% stake in the Ohio-based EnviroFlight. They're all eyeing a big market for high-protein insect-based feed—and, eventually, food-products.
For this latest round, Ÿnsect’s lead investor was Asatnor Ventures in Belgium. There have also been investments from French banks, the deeptech fund Supernova in France, the Armat Group in Luxembourg, plus Hong Kong’s Happiness Capital.
For Hubert, an agricultural scientist, the success has been a long time coming. He spent years researching insects as a source of protein. Back in the late 2000s, he began showing school children how to raise worm farms in boxes, by feeding them organic waste like banana peels. Realizing he could do the same on a large scale, he found a farmer who was breeding insects for fish bait and recruited him to help launch Ÿnsect.
Hubert is now building a far bigger factory, which is set to open a year from now in French President Emmanuel Macron’s hometown of Amiens. The company is also scouting for a location to open a U.S. plant, perhaps as soon as 2022. Hubert says it is likely to be a joint venture with a Big Ag company, several of which are already in private discussions with Ÿnsect. “It will be easier for us to rely on them for permitting, subcontracting for building, and so on,” Hubert says.
Hubert says he plans to start selling insect-based pet food in the U.S. before next summer, after completing trials with the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
In fact, insect-farming faces complicated regulatory hurdles in both the European Union and the U.S. In Europe, farmed insects fall under the same regulations as other farm animals, and it has taken Hubert years to be cleared for selling his fish-meal products. Next will come poultry and livestock, and finally humans; he expects to have E.U. clearance for human consumption sometime next year. In the U.S. too, he has spent nearly two years working to get permission to sell pet food, which he believes is close.
"Just the beginning"
That is just the start. As shareholders press agricultural companies to cut their carbon emissions, several have begun considering how to recycle the mammoth amounts of byproducts and waste generated by large-scale production. “There is a lot more consciousness among investors about Earth issues,” says food entrepreneur Nicolas Bernadi in San Francisco, who sits on Ÿnsect’s board. “I am convinced this is just the beginning,”
Bernadi says he foresees huge growth in the U.S., where the market is wide open. As the agricultural industry begins focusing on insects, there will likely be plenty of competitors, but Ÿnsect’s head start gives it a marked advantage. “The learning curve is long,” Bernadi says. “You are talking about farming species that no one really knows.” What is more, he says, Ÿnsect’s appeal could grow as companies focus more on sustainability. “Investors will want to put their money where there is a good effect on the planet,” he says.
That good effect seems indisputable, according to the data.
Right now, the world is able to feed itself. But to keep pace with population growth, agriculture will need to shift drastically, and quickly, especially as floods and wildfires are destroying crops with greater frequency. The FAO's prediction is grim. “There is enough cropland to feed 9 billion in 2050 if the 40% of all crops produced today for feeding animals were used directly for human consumption,” it says. "This is crucial in the context of climate change.”
With available land squeezed, there might soon be no better way to feed all the world’s farm animals, than farming insects in huge quantities--all indoors. That is something movie stars can dig.
April 7, 2020: This article has been updated to include the names of Ÿnsect’s non-U.S. investors.
Lead photo: A Antoine Hubert, co-founder, and CEO of Ynsect, in 2018 with a handful of mealworm beetle larvae, fresh off the production line. Photograph by Veronique de Viguerie
A New Factory In France Will Mass-Produce Bugs As Food
A new facility in northern France aims to help solve the future of food problems in a new, unexpected, and kind of cringe-inducing way: by manufacturing a huge volume of bugs—for eating
October 08, 2020
Though the world’s population is no longer predicted to grow as much as we thought by the end of this century, there are still going to be a lot more people on Earth in 30, 50, and 80 years than there are now. And those people are going to need healthy food that comes from a sustainable source. Technologies like cultured meat and fish, vertical farming, and genetic engineering of crops are all working to feed more people while leaving a smaller environmental footprint.
A new facility in northern France aims to help solve the future of food problems in a new, unexpected, and kind of cringe-inducing way: by manufacturing a huge volume of bugs—for eating.
Before you gag and close the page, though, wait; these particular bugs aren’t intended for human consumption, at least not directly.
Our food system and consumption patterns are problematic not just because of the food we eat, but because of the food our food eats. Factory farming uses up a ton of land and resources; a 2018 study found that while meat and dairy provide just 18 percent of the calories people consume, it uses 83 percent of our total farmland and produces 60 percent of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions. That farmland is partly taken up by the animals themselves, but it’s also used to grow crops like corn and soy exclusively for animal consumption.
And we’re not just talking cows and pigs. Seafood is part of the problem, too. Farm-raised salmon, for example, are fed not just smaller fish (which depletes ecosystems), but also soy that’s grown on land.
Enter the insects. Or, more appropriately, in this case, enter Ÿnsect, the French company with big ambitions to help change the way the world eats. Ÿnsect raised $125 million in Series C funding in early 2019, and at the time already had $70 million worth of aggregated orders to fill. Now they’re building a bug-farming plant to churn out tiny critters in record numbers.
You’ve probably heard of vertical farms in the context of plants; most existing vertical farms use LED lights and a precise mixture of nutrients and water to grow leafy greens or other produce indoors. They maximize the surface area used for growing by stacking several layers of plants on top of one another; the method may not make for as much space as outdoor fields have but can yield a lot more than you might think.
Ÿnsect’s new plant will use layered trays too, except they’ll be cultivating beetle larvae instead of plants. The ceilings of the facility are 130 feet high—that’s a lot of vertical space to grow bugs in. Those of us who are grossed out by the thought will be glad to know that the whole operation will be highly automated; robots will tend to and harvest the beetles, and AI will be employed to keep tabs on important growing conditions like temperature and humidity.
The plant will initially be able to produce 20,000 tons of insect protein a year, and Ÿnsect is already working with the biggest fish feed company in the world, though production at the new facility isn’t slated to start until 2022.
Besides fish feed, Ÿnsect is also marketing its product for use in fertilizer and pet food. It’s uncertain how realistic the pet food angle is, as I’d imagine most of us love our pets too much to feed them bugs. But who knows—there’s plenty of hypothesizing that insects will be a central source of protein for people in the future, as they’re not only more sustainable than meat, but in some cases more nutritious too.
We’ll just have to come up with some really creative recipes.
Image Credit: Ÿnsect
Vanessa is the senior editor of Singularity Hub. She's interested in renewable energy, health and medicine, international development, and countless other topics. When she's not reading or writing you can usually find her outdoors, in water, or on a plane.
TAGS Future of Food
Shenandoah Growers Opens Next Generation USDA Certified Indoor Biofarms In Virginia
The new BioFarms will solve persistent problems in the fresh product supply chain – delivering peak freshness, longer shelf life, enhanced food safety, reduced food miles, and year-round organic supply.
ROCKINGHAM, Va. — Shenandoah Growers, Inc., the US leader in indoor USDA certified organic agriculture, has begun harvests at its next generation BioFarm facilities in Rockingham and Elkwood, Virginia. The company will now grow, pack and ship locally grown, premium quality organic produce from its sustainable indoor farms to its customers in the Mid-Atlantic region 365 days a year.
Shenandoah Growers BioFarm Basil Plants
The new BioFarms will solve persistent problems in the fresh product supply chain – delivering peak freshness, longer shelf life, enhanced food safety, reduced food miles, and year-round organic supply. Shenandoah’s sustainable growing technology uses bioactive soil and fresh water, just like in nature, producing healthy organic plants and delivering on the company’s mission to reduce its carbon footprint and lead in environmental stewardship.
The Rockingham BioFarm will supply 100% of Shenandoah’s basil in the Mid-Atlantic region, marking the transition away from traditional field production. Basil is not only the best-selling herb, but it is also the most difficult to grow and ship nationally due to its vulnerability to weather volatility, disease and temperature damage. The Elkwood BioFarm will supply the company’s new line of local organic lettuces to Mid-Atlantic customers.
“Being able to grow the totality of our basil demand inside our pack house and not fly or truck hundreds or thousands of miles from the field was inconceivable when I entered the business over 20 years ago,” says Tim Heydon, CEO.
While Shenandoah Growers are pioneers in indoor organic agriculture, they are quick to emphasize that the company has been farming and operating in the industry for over 30 years. Chief Customer Officer Steven Wright intoned, “It’s one thing to be able to grow indoors, it’s quite another to harvest, pack and deliver with consistent quality 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year while meeting demand during peak seasons.”
The company points out that its indoor production units, many of which have been in operation for over 4 years, are proven efficient. According to company President, Phillip Karp, “Fundamentally we are about the democratization of sustainably grown organic produce, and for the promise of indoor agriculture to truly unlock its great potential, it must achieve cost parity with traditional farming. Anything we launch from our indoor farms will be scalable and profitable for us and our customers and affordable for the shopper.”
The company is in the process of accelerating its indoor farming capacity with a clearly defined plan to deploy additional next generation USDA certified organic Biofarms across its entire national platform of operating locations.
About Shenandoah Growers, Inc.
Founded in 1989, Shenandoah Growers is the leading grower and marketer of fresh organic culinary herbs in the United States, providing sustainable, USDA certified organic, regionally grown produce to retailers coast-to-coast. The Rockingham, Virginia-based company has developed the nation’s largest commercial indoor organic growing systems and continues to redefine how to bring fresh, organic, and sustainably farmed produce to market—operating across a nationally integrated platform of farms, production, and logistics facilities. For more information, please visit www.shenandoahgrowers.com.
Under the THAT’S TASTY® BRAND, Shenandoah Growers provides USDA organic, non-GMO, regionally grown, and sustainably farmed fresh culinary herbs and greens. Launched in 2017, the THAT’S TASTY BRAND offers consumers ways to add Pure Organic Flavor™ to their everyday cooking by offering a full line of products including living organic herb plants, fresh cut herbs, herb purees, lettuces and microgreens. www.thatstasty.com
US: COLORADO - EPFL + Caulys --> Inauguration - October 21st & 23rd, 2019
We have installed 18 automated indoor greenhouses at EPFL (Coupole, CO building), to produce ultra-local and fresh food for the campus!
We are pleased to invite you to the Inauguration Days
of the EPFL + Caulys installation!
What is it?
We have installed 18 automated indoor greenhouses at EPFL (Coupole, CO building), to produce ultra-local and fresh food for the campus!
This will be the occasion for you to explore the details of this unique urban farming installation, and enjoy delicious greens grown there!
When?
21st and 23rd of October 2019 from 12h00 to 14h00: information stand and tasting of microgreens grown on-site,
22nd of October 2019 from 12h00 to 14h00: presentation and aperitif!
At EPFL, just there!
We look forward to seeing you there!
Caulis team
French Insect Farming Startup Ynsect Raises $125m Series C Breaking European Agtech Record
Ÿnsect, the French insect farming startup, has raised $125 million in Series C funding in the largest early-stage agtech funding deal on record in Europe. This takes the company’s total fundraising to over $160 million since it was founded in 2011.
Ÿnsect farms mealworms to produce ingredients for fish feed, pet food, and crop fertilizers in an effort to capture some of the $500 billion animal feed market. The startup is one of 50 insect farming groups that have collectively raised $480 million to-date, according to the International Platform of Insects for Food and Feed (IPIFF), an EU-based association for the industry. In 2018, members of the association produced 6,000 tonnes of insects in 20 countries.
Insect farming, long an industry in developing nations for human consumption, has picked up pace in developed nations in recent years as a sustainable source of protein, particularly for the livestock industries.
Aquaculture, for example, still relies mostly on fishmeal, which is made up of wild-caught fish representing over 25% of global fishing and contributing to declining wild fish stock globally.
Ÿnsect is also offering a premium product to its customers, providing health benefits that translate into improved animal growth performance and boosted immune systems, according to Antoine Hubert, co-founder and CEO of Ÿnsect.
“Farmers can essentially produce more with less with our premium feed ingredients,” he told AgFunderNews adding that the company’s organic fertilizer product is also yielding great results for plant growth across types from grains to vine crops.
While Ÿnsect’s products will represent a core component animal feed, they are one ingredient and not a complete solution at this point, meaning that existing feed sources will still be used, Hubert added. However, he imagines a future where Ÿnsect’s mealworm products could be combined with other types of insects with other beneficial nutritional profiles and sustainable sourcing methods.
The investment round was led by Astanor Ventures, a new food and agriculture impact investment fund based in London. The majority of Ÿnsect’s existing investors including Bpifrance Ecotechnologies, managed on behalf of the French Strategic Investment Plan, Demeter, Quadia, and Singapore’s Vis Vires New Protein Ventures are participating in this latest round, alongside Bpifrance Large Venture, Talis Capital (UK), Idinvest Partners, Crédit Agricole Brie Picardie, Caisse d’Epargne Hauts-de-France and Picardie Investissement (France), Finasucre and Compagnie du Bois Sauvage (Belgium), Happiness Capital (Hong Kong) and a Singaporean family office as new investors.
World’s Largest Insect Farm
Ÿnsect will use the funding to construct what it says will be the largest insect farm in the world, based in Amiens in northern France with the first phase able to produce 20,000 tonnes of insect protein a year.
The company already has a demo facility producing its three main products — ŸnMeal andŸnOil, feed ingredients for pet food as well as several seafood species including shrimp, salmon, trout, and sea-bass, and ŸnFrass, a premium fertilizer for a variety of crop types.
And the company says it has $70 million of aggregated orders to fulfill, which it will start to fulfill at the pilot facility that has the capacity to produce hundreds of tonnes.
The Amiens factory is expandable beyond the initial 20,000 tonnes, according to Hubert as it is situated on a large reserve area in an industrial park with all the necessary supplies and facilities including energy and wastewater treatment. And Ÿnsect is also surveying options to expand to North America, particularly the Midwest of the US, after partnering with a real estate group JLL that’s currently scouting locations.
What’s the Technology?
After two years of operating the pilot facility, and over five years researching the business before that, Ÿnsect has refined its farming and extraction processes using state of the art technology and resulting in 25 patents. The factory uses a combination of sensor technology, automation, data analysis and predictive modeling to measure and respond to temperature, insects’ growth curve, and weight, and Co2 emissions.
“We are very much like a vertical farming business in how we operate, and we have the same issues around the HVAC systems we use to control the environment,” said Hubert. “We’ve developed a deep knowledge and process in this area that could be useful for other sectors at a high level. We have very complex systems for temperature, moisture control; conveyor systems to feed and harvest the insects as well as collect the frass and mature for our fertilizer product and remove the dead with various separation technologies.”
The extraction technologies are very similar to those used in oilseed crushing with some innovation in how to handle the products and separate out the protein.
Unlike many of the large groups in the vertical produce farming industry, Ÿnsect has partnered with existing tech companies to build its systems, and it has long term contracts with groups such as Total, which is big in HVAC systems.
Why the Tenebrio Molitor Beetle?
Ÿnsect decided to rear the Tenebrio Molitor beetle not only for its premium nutritional value in animal feed compared to other insects but for its potential to achieve industrial-scaled production. As non-flying insects, they are easier to contain, and they consume natural crop-based by-products, free of unpleasant odors or contaminants. It’s also “a gregarious, non-flying, communal insect that prefers to stay close to its colony for added warmth,” and it’s nocturnal, saving on lighting costs, according to Ynsect.
Nutrition-wise, Ÿnsect undertook several research projects to determine the efficacy of its products and discovered increases to the overall body weight of shrimp while being fed Ynsect products and a reduced amount of fishmeal. ŸnMeal also improved the feed efficiency and weight gain in seabass.
Other well-funded insect farming startups are rearing other types of insects such as AgriProtein, the UK-South African venture that’s farming black soldier fly and has raised over $130 million to-date. AgriProtein focuses on using food waste to feed its insects. Canada’s Enterra Feed is also growing black soldier fly for animal feed and says it is building the world’s largest insect farm, while EnviroFlight, the Midwestern company that was acquired by Intrexon, says it has the biggest black soldier fly factory in the US. The race is on!