OBJECTIVE 1
Research in insect rearing
Most research on insects’ nutritional value, farming conditions (including substrates they use as a source of nutrients), and especially processing technology and their impact on growth performance and feed conversion efficiency in animals when used as animal feed have just started to develop. Mealworms (Coleoptera: Tenebrionidae), are considered good candidates for this purpose as they have suitable properties as: low substrate, water and space requirements, high feed conversion ratio and appropriate biological properties: high fecundity and multivoltine life cycle. Therefore, the objectives of this project include nutritional composition characterization of two insect species Tenebrio molitor (Linnaeus, 1758) and Zophobas morio (Fabricius, 1776) reared on several different nutritional substrates (cereals, oilseeds, and their industry by-products) under laboratory scale conditions, to select the ones appropriate for the mass farming (production upscaling).
Mass farming would be then carried out on the nutritional substrate that results in the best larvae yield with an optimal nutritional composition selected to produce larger amounts of insect larvae to be processed into animal feed. Using insects as a substitute for plant-based protein feed materials (e.g. soybean) we will be able to lower the environmental impact on production by reducing agricultural area needed for animal feed production. Moreover, although it is known that insect rearing produces less greenhouse gasses than farm animals, it is of great importance to quantify greenhouse gas emissions of their production under specific rearing conditions (insect species, nutritional substrate, microclimate, etc). Therefore, PRO-SUSTAIN will evaluate the environmental footprint of insect farming through greenhouse gas emissions measurements. This will be done for selected insect species reared on the best-fitting nutritional substrate.