Entrepreneur Turns Wins Award For Turning Waste Food Into Animal Feed

The question that is quite daunting is that if the animals we consume turn extinct due to lack of feed, what happens then? An environmentalist and entrepreneur answers that with an alternative maggot-based animal feed made out of waste food. He has won the Global Champion Award by The Food Chain on BBC World Service for his company.

What Is The Actual Concern?

The overall population is growing and along with that there is a rising concern about the resources animals that humans consume are going to deplete. For example, the farm animal and fish are fed fishmeal that is made up of wild-caught fish. If the demand for this meal increases the wild-caught fish will be endangered.

How Will The Idea Work?

Chickens and farm animals if left to fend for food naturally they land up eating maggots. Now what Jason and his company is doing is that they’ve set up a factory in Cape Town that breeds maggots using recycled food waste. Dan Claims, Factory Shift Manager explains, “The process starts where we take organic waste, which is from restaurants, hotels. Otherwise the food would go into landfill. We bring them here and we mix them. We take the larvae which we have and place it on the feed. After eating it the larvae is quite big. Then we dry it up and then from there we make our ‘MagMeal’.

Jason’s idea is working three-fold. It solves the problem of rising demand for animal feed, the food waste is being put to a good purpose and since the factory employees the locals, it’s even creating job opportunities for the community. And as for the farm animal, they actually like the maggot-based meal. “I’ve actually from time to time tried their maggots, just chucked them amongst the chickens and the chickens love it. They go crazy for it.” says a farmer Angus McIntosh