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  • First of all, we are farming the insects themselves, so we take the eggs and we convert them back into adult flies, which make and lay more eggs in a specialist condition.

  • So this is fully indoors, artificial breeding, allowing us to do it here in the UK or anywhere on the planet.

  • So in this room, we have around 200,000 insects at different life stages, all the way from With the 1% repopulating the cages, these larvae are a couple of days old, so we're looking at three to four days old, there's probably around 10,000 to 20,000 larvae in there.

  • Eight days later, we're looking at close to an inch.

  • The rest of the larvae we then use to eat food waste, so we're using brewery grains, potato waste, coffee waste to feed the insects, and within a six to eight day period, they consume all of that food, convert it into soil, a fertiliser, and then we have nice large larvae which we can process into a protein flour that can be used for different markets.

  • So this is what's called the frass, this is essentially the leftover from what the larvae eat.

  • So 10 days ago, this was beer grains, potato waste, and coffee, and now it's a very usable, completely smell-free fertiliser.

  • We're using black soldier fly larvae as the protein source, it is the fastest converter of food waste back into protein.

  • The reason we're using black soldier fly is not just because of that, it's also because it's non-disease, the adults don't have a mouth.

  • Just last summer, the regulations opened to allow this to be used in aquaculture, so salmon farming for example, and next year we'll be allowing for chickens.

  • And the best thing is, is that insects are just the natural food for animals.

  • How do you catch a fish?

  • You put an insect on the end of the hook.

  • Chickens are free-range, they're always running around the field eating insects, because that is the way that nature feeds animals.

  • It's simple.

  • This room, which is around four metres cubed, will eventually be able to produce about a tonne of protein per day.

  • So each of these, again, has specialist-aged larvae.

  • So we can do this in six to eight days, all day, every day, 365 days a year, in any environmental condition.

  • The ability to produce this in such small areas is the fundamentally important part, as well as producing it hyper-locally.

  • The engineers of today are the farmers of tomorrow.

  • The way that we produce food now is so inefficient, it's so environmentally damaging, that we need a complete revolution within this whole space.

  • This is where our real IP and our magic happens.

  • This is the first fully automated insect protein breeding room in the world.

  • This entire device automatically will feed each chamber with exactly the right population at exactly the right time, and then move on to the next chamber.

  • And the whole point being is that we have six cages here, but we can scale this to 60, 600, 6,000, 600,000.

  • It's a completely modulated, scalable technology that's fully automated.

  • Insects themselves have multiple different flavours, but the ones that we're producing, black soldier flies, have a very nutty, peanutty taste.

  • It's just us in the West that hasn't quite got there yet.

  • We will.

  • It's coming, and we want to be at the front of this evolution of food again.

First of all, we are farming the insects themselves, so we take the eggs and we convert them back into adult flies, which make and lay more eggs in a specialist condition.

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