Black Soldier Flies are like gold to agripreneur Roseanne Mwangi. She fondly remembers her first encounter with these tiny insects, enthusiastically dubbing them ‘Brown Live Gold’.
In recent years, Black Soldier Flies have gained recognition as an excellent alternative protein source for pigs, chickens, and fish in Kenya. Traditionally, Kenyan farmers relied on soybeans to provide protein for their animals.
Due to low domestic production, the country has a shortage of soybeans, resulting in expensive import taxes.
Recently, a small group of farmers came across the nutritional value of Black Soldier Flies and haven’t looked back since. Roseanne Mwangi is one of them.
She hit the jackpot when she realized that these little black insects were the solution to her draining pockets due to animal feeds albeit doing small-scale farming operations. BSFs have become a dependable, sustainable, safe, and affordable protein source for numerous farmers.
Initially, Roseanne Mwangi was a pig farmer in the Makuyu area of Kenya. She fed her animals locally-made fishmeal and soybean feeds. However, she soon realized that the expenses on feeds weren’t matching the returns.
Stars seemed to align for Roseanne Mwangi when she attended a conference in 2018 and visited a research farm in Uganda. She learnt how to get chicken feed from housefly larvae that fed on pig manure.
Before long, all roads for Ms Mwangi led her to Nairobi’s ICIPE centre to quench her curiosity. At ICIPE, she learned that Black Soldier Flies are highly efficient waste recyclers in the insect world.
Unlike common houseflies, they don’t have mouths and pose minimal risk to human or animal health, making them a groundbreaking solution for her farming needs.
Roseanne Mwangi is the founder of Sagel Oink Ventures in Kisaju, Kitengela. She began producing BSFs on her farm in May 2019. Assisted by five other farmhands, they used potato peel waste as a substrate for the flies to feed on and grow.
Adult black soldier flies have one goal, to lay eggs. Their resulting larvae can consume a variety of food scraps and waste materials, quickly transforming leftovers into protein. These larvae only take 10-14 days to reach full maturity from hatching.
At this stage, they’re fed to animals, offering a protein-rich food source for livestock. Now, they produce over 500kg of BSFs every week, which are directly fed to her chickens and pigs. These high-protein insects increase her animals’ growth rates when fed on BSFs weekly.
“Within two months, our chickens weigh 800 grams more and appear huge compared to layers and broilers in the market,” said Ms Mwangi in a past interview.
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Ms. Mwangi is a contracted pig seller for Farmer’s Choice. She can sell one pig for between Sh. 14,000 and Sh. 18,000. Currently, her pigs’ feeding ratio of BSFs is 25%, but she aims to increase it to between 80 and 90%.
“When feeding the pigs with black soldier flies, we have noticed that the pigs get to marketable size one and a half to two months earlier, which in turn reduces the feeding and labour costs involved in pig production in my facility.”
“We have also noted the significant reduction in fat, resulting in more lean meat production from the pigs,’ says Ms Mwangi.
Farmer’s Choice consistently grades the carcass quality of Ms. Mwangi’s pigs as ‘grade one’, particularly noting the eye of the loin for its lower fat content compared to other suppliers.
As a result, Farmer’s Choice sought to develop a partnership model with Ms. Mwangi to train other pig farmers on black soldier fly rearing techniques, based on her successful results.
