So wonderful to join hands with Thibault Guille and Arthur de Dinechin to scale their Bioani insect farm in – and beyond – Côte d’Ivoire, through our EMpact venture studio (with the invisible hand of my co-founder Prateek Shrivastava right there!).
The young founders of startups coming out of our university partners, such as International University of Grand-Bassam and Institut National Polytechnique Félix HOUPHOUËT-BOIGNY de Yamoussoukro (INP-HB) Officiel in Côte d’Ivoire, will now be able to create their own insect farm businesses using the expertise, network, training and funding from EMpact and Bioani.
Black soldier fly (BSF) farming is the most widespread form of insect farming in the world. The BSF is ideally suited for food production due to its rapid reproduction cycle and high concentration of protein, making its larvae an ideal source of food for a wide variety of animals. The BSF frass is also one of the best organic fertilizers to a wide variety of plants. And thanks to its chitin protein content, is has the added benefit of inducing the immune responses in plants, thus suppressing many plant diseases.
All this in a highly sustainable fashion as insect farming is much more efficient than the farming of cattle, pigs, and poultry. Insects are 4 to 10 times more efficient in converting nutrients into body mass. In addition, insect larvae feed on a wider range of residual waste streams that are efficiently converted into protein-rich body mass.
Finally, insect farming requires much less space and water, and the emission of greenhouse gases is also lower.
In short, an insect farming business offers a sustainable solution for the growing global demand for protein, and we can now offer it to young students and alumni of our university partners who wish to become entrepreneurs doing well to their businesses by doing good to our planet.
Big thanks to our Advisory Board member Nouss Bih for believing in Bioani and making the connection.
