2019 to present - Maggot Farmer

Maggot farming general.

Other micro breeding businesses welcome.

So, you're living the wage slave life and want to make a break for it. You've had some half hearted attempts at starting other businesses, maybe even gotten as far as making a website and some e-mail addresses before the whole project fizzled out when you realized just how much money you would need to sink into the business before you turned a profit in 2-5 years.

Well, let me show you something. Black soldier fly larvae are the easiest commercially viable thing to breed, and command a respectable price due to their nutritional profile (Studies will be posted in this thread) and due to them being more efficient at converting waste into biomass than any other vermicomposting method (worm farms, meal worms, etc.). Their excretions are anti-bacterial, so they are clean, and the adult flies have no mouthparts (The adults exist only to breed and lay eggs) and thus are neither disease carriers nor bothersome.

I'll post some videos, papers and general information in here. I've dabbled in breeding them myself, and their properties aren't hype. I'm looking to do this on the side as I've just bought a restaurant and would love to do something with the waste.

youtube.com/watch?v=DhR2jDS2IJI

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Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=IWChH9MHkHg
youtu.be/CmDBmqcAE40
youtube.com/watch?v=zT6coN0v25o&list=PLo-mpis4DIHGltQudBrSFY3Bc-R1TtlXF&index=2&t=0s
youtube.com/watch?v=im42xjLEk3A
youtube.com/watch?v=oIJqg8cO9wg
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

where do you breed this shit? need a big space? how much waste are we talking about? how much do you produce and how much does it sell for?

OP from other thread here. Going to become a maggot farmer ASAP.

This is a popular listing on amazon, the maggots weight between 4-7 maggots per gram.

So that's about 400 maggots, overconservative guesstimate puts that at 100 grams of maggots for $23 dollars... That's $230 per kilo. Of course, bulk orders and bulk suppliers will offer different rates, but small orders are the best return at the moment.

Find some more prices for you in the interim.

In my experiment, I was able to breed 5kg of maggots in one small 25 litre tub.

I'll find you the life cycle speed and biomass conversion stats.

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Life cycle in days, but this is variable with temperature (Higher temperatures are generally better, and necessary for excluding mites)

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Once the maggot has finished growing, and begun pupation, it turns dark and journeys upwards. In nature this is so that it can attach to something high up and pupate into an adult, but our use for this is that it makes the BSF larvae self harvesting.

Attached: self-harvesting-black-soldier-fly-larvae.gif (320x180, 870K)

posting in potential epic thread, keep it coming OP

alright and why would anyone buy these maggots instead of their cheaper feed? and if they are better what happens when big corps catch up and put you out of business with their mass scale?

Literally making me hype for maggot farming

Because they increase growth rates for chickens when added as a supplement to pellets.
The prices quoted before are for small orders, supplying people who are looking to breed their own larvae. The price given to a feed supplier would be considerably less, but considering you are converting literal waste into profit you can price your competition out.

So, seeing as they are better and cheaper then the only concern is when big corps catch up, and that's the same situation with any start up. Sell up to them, move onto something else, not sure. Maybe diversify into aquaculture, seeing as your feed is literally free. Start selling fish instead, until a big corp catches on.

Attached: Effects-of-inclusion-of-black-soldier-fly-larva-meal-BSFLM-in-corn-soybean-meal-diet.png (850x210, 26K)

Show us your maggots OP

OP is a maggot

>I'm looking to do this on the side as I've just bought a restaurant and would love to do something with the waste.
Is this a common problem for restaurants?
This guy accepts all kinds of food waste for his chickens and compost business
youtube.com/watch?v=IWChH9MHkHg

Do restaurants actually pay for people to haul the waste?
It's loaded with nutrients
I like your idea, thanks for sharing

Yeah definitely, anywhere with food whether it's a restaurant or grocery is going to have whole bins of rotten waste piling up quickly. They can either pay to transport it to a dump or pay less/nothing to let some rando take it off their hands with a smile. It's a win/win that way, which I always loved about this kind of stuff.

t. Friend is a hog rancher that gets his livestock's whey from spoiled milk the local grocery tosses out.

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So the larvae convert between 10-24% of the weight of feed given to them into biomass, of course accounting for water content and other considerations. Even if it's 5%, you get 20kg of waste organics from a restaurant per day you're going to find you are growing 1kg of BSF larvae a day. Then it's just containers and packaging, a listing on Ebay or Amazon or your local classified, and you're off.

I've been too busy in the past months, they're dead. I'll go see if there's any putrid husks remaining.

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What a faggot I guess you should have taken better care of your maggots faggot!

Hang on, I just checked the tub and they're still alive.

They've been in there since before christmas. It's not really pretty in there, but there's a few hundred maggots still trying to get out.

Put them in a different tank and clean the bodies out you fucking sociopath/retard

Are u trying help us or promoting ur YouTube?

My youtube account is something completely unrelated to this, it's genuinely help for dudes crazy enough to be a maggot farmer.

All beings are conscious and feel pain like you.

I don't understand the LARP, bro. What's the point of it? Are you slyly trying to say that people who didn't work for Goldman are maggots, or what? Redpill me on this bizarre thread and maggot discussion in the context of the previous thread

it's probably not worth it packaging and selling
but I've seen maggot buckets above/adjacent to chicken pens
the farmer will put waste material into the bucket and the maggots will decompose it and fall out and get devoured by your chickens

This isn't a LARP, I'm building a new enclosure for the survivors as we speak. In the context of the previous thread, I know how hard it is to struggle and if I can help one person it's worth it to me.

I'd also just like people here to discuss viable business, not just crypto shilling.

Yeah, that's the end goal of hobby farmers and the like. But the demand for BSFL larvae is high, and the hobby farmers still need to purchase once or twice a year to maintain their population due to poor maintenance.

OK based then my bad

>All beings are conscious and feel pain like you.
you are a retard

He isn’t wrong they all feel pains they all have nerves. Make no sense if they don’t.

Well, I washed, rehomed and fed the maggots. Cherry tomatoes, oats, water and alaskan pollock are on the menu tonight.

Would have kept posting but I didn't want to leave them stuck in hell.

Anyway, that goes to show that you don't have to worry about your stock dying overnight. They were in there for over 3 months.

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I was growing mushrooms like 7 years ago and forgot a couple 30lb birdseed bags in my house
a couple weeks later moth larva invested my house it took weeks to get rid of all the moths

>$230 per kg
Seriously why am I such a moralfag.

I know that if I tried this I’d begin to like them and be unable to betray them and kill them once it’s time.. fuck me

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Some success stories with mushroom growing were actually what started me on this idea. I explored mushrooms (They're expensive as fuck in Australia), Duckweed & Azolla, worms/vermicomposting/aquaponics feed, and eventually settled on this as the most profitable and viable.

It's a large growth sector in the third world, they're the ones growing the fish we eat these days. Works out cheaper and better for them, instead of feeding the fish ground up chickens they feed them pelletized maggots. And antibiotics. Don't eat fish from the supermarket.

Well, just ship the live ones. You can think of them heading off to a nice hobby farm, to have lots of kids. The chickens won't be eating the ones you send out, either. Those ones will complete their full life cycle, chances are even their children will complete their full life cycle. Pretty much 100% of the maggots you breed will have a full, productive life.

So there's a few different ways to grow and harvest the things for live sale. You can sell them once they've pupated, they can stay as a pupae for two weeks. You can sell two week old larvae, as they're the largest and most impressive. But the most economical way is instead selling the newly hatched eggs. One fly produces around 500 eggs, enough to sell once they've hatched into tiny larvae for around $10-$15. Means an absolutely minuscule shipping cost.

So the real benefit of the business isn't actually small scale, it's what you can do once you can justify a lease on a commercial property.

If you can double dip at all on waste, i.e. get someone to pay you for removing waste, then things get crazy. If you have say, a green waste collection service and an employee you can get them to drive around, picking up bags of yard waste justifying the wage and expense of your employee, and then compost your now negative cost biomass and turn it into premium feed.

Hell, you could probably just tell any lawn guy to start dumping his waste at your depot if you don't want an employee.

So it just comes down to a numbers game. Your feed solution is cheaper, more sustainable (There are oodles of grants for that stuff here in Aus.) and of a higher quality than pelletized grain. The sky's the limit.

So whaddya think Jow Forums? We could start a decentralized maggot breeding enterprise and revolutionise the stockfeed scene.

Come on Jow Forums, this is seriously a business with near to no outgoings, scalability from the size of a bucket to a statewide supplier, minimal staff requirement, no startup costs and no-one's interested?
Can people at least criticize it? I will be doing this in the future here, after we sell the restaurant in a couple of years.

So you sell maggots to fish food pellet makers?

Would love to do this but my mum will beat the living shit out of me if she saw what I was doing.

Have a business plan and tell her it will allow you to pay more for rent. Bitches are down for anything if it makes then dosh.

Fish food pellet makers, chicken food pellet makers, direct to customer facing grain stores, pet & reptile suppliers, aquaponics stores, aquaculture suppliers, stockfeed suppliers (supplements for cattle feed), direct to consumer via internet. I'd do all of them as the turnaround time from signing a supply contract, you could supply increased volume in one month.

You're unequivocally based for posting this thread, I love shit like this. Only thing is, I suck with sales calls/meetings and that kind of stuff. Have you ever successfully sold via any other means than via internet, or have you not sold any so far? Apologies if you already mentioned it in the thread earlier, at work and just skimming it atm.

I just sold via internet. Bough some larvae for $20, put them in a tub with a couple of kilos of waste oats, added some scraps to it over two months and then sold off 15 200 gram tubs on gumtree for $30 each. Total investment was $20 of larvae, $2 worth of containers, a $15 tub and some old fly wire I found in the shed.

If you suck at customer facing stuff, I'd stick to the internet until you build up confidence. Pet stores are pretty easy to deal with, they'll seriously screw you on price though but it could be a good place to gain exposure. Go to some permaculture/hobby farm meetings would be your best bet I'd say. You can command a good price from the start, and work your way up talking to bigger players, or maybe even find someone that's willing to go partner with you if they're stronger at negotiation or understand suppliers.

Very nice work man, great stuff.

I have an empty garage that I'd love to try this out in. Only thing is, it's poorly insulated as it's made from concrete. Will the maggots be able to flourish under those conditions do you think? I'm from the UK, so it's Spring-time right now.

The maggots generate quite a bit of heat, so it would just be a case of some insulation in winter. Some sort of insulative blanket, how cold does it get there in winter?

Based thread cheers, may look into this once I move out

Any friends have a few chickens on a large block? Grow them there, give free maggots in exchange for letting you grow there.

Actually just pay for everything in maggots.

Not really, I'm really in the middle of a city in a small appartment but will move to its outskirts in a few weeks, with a small garden. Was thinking of buying a couple of chickens to try guess I could do both

Got it, thanks. Can get as cold as -3, -4 in the Winter. Any idea what their ideal room temperature is? I think even if I e.g. covered the wall in carpeting or fibreglass, etc, it may still be too cold for them.

Ideal temperature is 30C. Might need to play around with that a bit. They need to mate mid flight, that will be your biggest trip up. I used fly wire, but I'd imagine in those temperatures you'd need one of those $50 greenhouses planted over your larvae bin, with a tiny heater.

I mean insulation should be enough for the larvae bin. Just not for the flies to mate.

At the very least this is useful info. I buy my chickens mealworms in winter, they're fucking expensive.

Animals feel pain like you.

and?

>muffled sòyim gibbering in the distance

Okay, I decided to actually try it. Could you please share just some steps how to get started? What equipment do I need etc? Thanks

Where are you in Aus, I might come do this with you

I'm in Gippsland.

Just typing up a starter for you.

thanks

Sure.
So long as you're looking to sell live larvae, then it's fairly simple. You'll want a strong tub with a well-fitting lid or cover. This will contain the maggots, food, and the maggot juice. They make a lot of juice.

And you'll want to get some sort of open air container for the breeding area, a large frame sealed with fly-wire/mesh is ideal, but to make it easy to begin with something like an old aquarium with fly wire on top should work fine.

You'll need to engineer a solution for the juice at some stage. It shouldn't be a problem for your first couple of batches, they're happy enough to swim around in it, but you will have to strain the maggots out of the juice.

So that's all you need to have the most BASIC of basic starts on growing these guys. A container to grow them in, a breeding enclosure where they can mate mid-flight, and something to strain the maggots out of the juice.

I recommend packing them in damp coco fiber for shipping.

I also recommend that you spend a bit of time looking through all of the permaculture forums about BSFL care, there are some fantastic designs on there. The only difference is, you don't want a system that harvests them automatically yet, you want to harvest your tub all at once and dump 100 or so into the breeding chamber.

If you harvest them, you can keep them somewhere cooler with restricted food and they will develop slower, so you can have a stockpile of nearly ready to pupate flies.

For breeding, you want to cut some squares out of corrugated cardboard and sticky tape them up high in the breeding chamber. The flies will lay their eggs on that if there is some food in the chamber below where they are breeding.

Once the eggs are laid, take the squares out and put them into a tub with some food. They'll hatch in a couple of days and the cycle starts again.

Damn just left Victoria 2 months ago,
What stops them all becoming flies? Do you just kill them /ship them beforehand? Or am I retarded and they never become flies?

The Dead Milkmen knew what was up 30 years ago. Bumping for the next meme crop.
youtu.be/CmDBmqcAE40

Bugger, where'd you go?

They won't become flies until they've climbed up something. They're supposed to climb up branches and things. They will still change if they stick themself in a corner of your container.

And yes, you just ship them beforehand. People are buying them to make their own, so it doesn't matter if one or two turn into flies mid transit. They have reduced activity and growth when they're away from food too, so if you pull them out two days early and ship them they'll stay maggots for a month.

my chickens live better than most people. Hell, they live better than I do. They get better food, more exercise, more time outside, and roughly equivalent medical care since I'm too cheap to pay for doctors I use their antibiotics when I'm sick.

I actually studied agronomy and tasted some maggot-made burger in my city, and I thought about this for some time, then I forgot though.

Great thread OP, keep it up !

That's awesome. Do you think the death of Monsanto will bring back permaculture and companion planting, or is everything just going to go in greenhouses?

genuinely a boss thread

Hopped over the border to SA to buy a decent property for a non crippling amount of money

Which means I have plenty of land to grow some fucking maggots. I have chickens too, so at least they'll be fed well if nothing else.

It's where I'd go if I weren't tied down here. Love the town planning out that way, completely lacking here.

Here's a playlist that seems pretty legit about commercial scale maggot farming. These videos might give the impression that the sector is saturated, but it is absolutely not.

youtube.com/watch?v=zT6coN0v25o&list=PLo-mpis4DIHGltQudBrSFY3Bc-R1TtlXF&index=2&t=0s

Monsanto is preparing the next big thing for sure, but will it work? I don't know. As always the market will be divided between plebian greenhouses and more "natural" aproaches, but this is not necessarilly a problem.

The most viable option at the moment in terms of crop production is definitely Dan Kittredge's approach which notably focuses on nutrients in the soil :
youtube.com/watch?v=im42xjLEk3A
To me this is the complete permacultural approach but it's unclear how things are going to unfold in the future.
I can though say with confidence that there is a new movement emerging in Europe (esp. France and Germany) that aim to take the no-till/permacultural/etc. approach to a greater scale than ever before. I think there is hope in that but, as always, the more economically sound will be the judge.

Nice, I haven't looked at much of Dan Kittredge's stuff but I'll watch that for sure. From skipping through it it seems to fall in line with my own experience, that biodiversity encourages a healthy ecosystem even in a small garden.

Alright guys, It's bedtime here. I'll post updates on the maggots tomorrow.

Is focus is not really biodiversity in itself but it's more about the soil and how you don't feed the plants but rather you go along with the dynamics between soil life and plant life. You don't override nature, you follow it and you enhance.
And he made the process very clear through many techniques. Marvelous series.

Where do u get your first maggots? How do they reproduce?

What does maggot juice taste like? Could you sell it to hippies as a health food?