Tag: Organic waste

Friday afternoon, the 23^rd of April, Lovisa Lindberg was standing in her office and held a presentation about larvae as a substitute for fish feed for high school students from Värmdö municipality. This was a part of BSSC’s (Baltic Sea Science Center) theme week at Skansen where they invited different experts to talk about their science projects related to the Baltic Sea. Classes from grade 9 up to grade 12 booked the lectures they wanted to attend to during this week. In addition to the lectures, they were sent material in advance to read or watch such as popular summaries about the topic or if there were any videos available. After the lecture, the work continued with a scientific paper related to the topic and the goal was for them to get an understanding of how a scientific paper is written.

Evgheni Ermolaev, researcher in environmental engineering answers a reader’s question about the difference between bokashi and conventional composting.

Read the answer (in Swedish, use google translate) at Forskning & Framsteg

Two treatment modules in form of modified shipping containers (6m x 2,4m x 2,5m) have arrived at Campus Ultuna and will house the larvae production for our animal feed projects.

One module (=first container) is designed to process the feed for the BSF larvae. This module consists of an area for milling and storing the feed stuff and washing the used treatment boxes. In the same module also the harvesting, washing and drying of the larvae is taking place.

The other module (=second container) is holding the treatment units, 22 racks with 11 boxes each. Each box itself can yield up to 2kg larval biomass reared on feedgraded organic sidestreams. The containers are well insulated against the current outdoor conditions of up to -15°C and a strong ventilation keeps the indoor environment at optimal conditions.

In future, the two modules can be moved and placed to any area with high waste generation. The modules each need a connection to electricity (32 amp) but only one of the modules need a connection to water and sewage.

The aim is to produce feed for our 5FiskiDisk project, rearing the larvae on bread and vegetable waste. For the chicken project, we will continue one of our projects from summer 2020 and will provide a total of 320 kg live larvae to the hens.

The project will use larvae provided by the fly colony at the SLU campus.

My name is Tobias Eisert. Since August 2020 am I in Uppsala as an exchange student. At my home university in Kassel/Germany am I studying Ecological Agriculture Sciences and I am about to finish my bachelor’s degree. One of my main interests regarding my studies are sustainable agriculture practices. For me, a functioning nutrient cycle is an important part of improved sustainability in the agricultural sector. The two-month long internship in the Black Soldier Fly Larvae lab gives me the opportunity to get some insights into this specific topic of BSFL composting but also more general in data collection, planning and carrying out of experiments.

The 25th of November, Lovisa Lindberg had her one year follow-up seminar. She talked about fly larvae composting, focusing on results from the first study about process efficiency, greenhouse gas emissions and pre-treatments with ammonia and fungi using orange peels and vegetables as substrates. The newly gotten result from the started second study was also mentioned, focusing on pre-treatment time and pre-treatment with ammonia and enzymes. The seminar ended with several interesting questions about the research.

Recently, Cecilia Lalander and Viktoria Wiklicky from our research group made a short 12 min video of the our Black Soldier Fly (BSF) rearing colony. Click on the link below to take a virtual tour of our facilities and to learn how we rear our flies, how the flies/larvae move through the various stages of their life cycle, and how to treat organic wastes using BSF larvae.

This summer the BSF farm supplied 40 laying hens with 25kg of live larva per week. The experiment stretched over 14 weeks and in the end a grand total of 350kg of live larva ended up as nutritious chicken feed! The hens were split up into three experimental groups, in addition to a control group, each group following a different diet: A standard chicken feed with a substitution of 10%, 20% and ad libitum larvae was provided to evaluate the impact on the hens. They were monitored on a regular basis with weekly measurements of hen body weight, egg production, and feed consumption. The amount of larvae consumed was measured daily and egg quality and behavior data were also collected. The researchers will use the results of this study to select the diet that includes the highest substitution of protein from soy to BSF larvae while still maintaining appropriate egg production and hen welfare.

The partnership between the Environmental Engineering Group at SLU and Dr. Ivã Guidini Lopes from the Aquaculture Center of Unesp (São Paulo, Brazil) resulted in a second publication, entitled “Reduction of bacteria in relation to feeding regimes when treating aquaculture waste in fly larvae composting”, recently published in Frontiers in Microbiology, as part of the research topic “Microbial dynamics during industrial rearing and processing of insects”.

David Jonsson has been working on development of a biopolymer from BSF larvae protein and now he has concluded his work. Join his Master Thesis presentation for degree project in biotechnology to find out more.