Is insect farming good for the environment?
Article written by Tom Bry-Chevalier
The idea of eating insects leaves few people indifferent, sparking sharply divided opinions. In the public eye, however, there is a consensus on one point: that it is a positive from an environmental perspective, to the extent that insects are often described as the food of the future. But is this really the case?
What do we farm insects for?
The idea that insects will mainly be used as food is well-established in our collective imagination, especially since the publication of a FAO report in 2013. However, it faces a gap between theory and practice. Indeed, the nascent insect farming industry is primarily intended for use in animal feed rather than for human consumption.
The market of insects as human food attracts only 5% of the funding in the insect farming sector. According to a Rabobank report, one of the most comprehensive analyses to date, "Their market share is negligible, and opportunities, at least for now, are limited." The report then explicitly excludes insects intended for human consumption from its industrial projections. This lack of opportunity, primarily due to low consumer demand, results in a sector that is unlikely to transform our dining experience.
Insects as protein sources
Although insects are touted for their high protein content, they are rarely consumed today as a replacement for meat. Approximately 90% of insect-based foods are products such as pasta, protein bars, whole insects, or cookies. While insects may perform better than some protein sources, such as whey, they generally have a higher environmental footprint than plant-based proteins. The incorporation of insects into plant-based products is thus likely to increase their overall environmental impact.
Environmental impact of insect consumption
What about comparing the environmental impact of insects and meat? Studies on the subject are still rare, but they indicate that insects generally have a lower environmental impact than meat in certain aspects such as energy consumption, land use or greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, even if in some cases they may emit more than chicken meat. On the other hand, they can cause a higher water consumption.
However, according to the few comparisons made in the literature between insects and plant-based alternatives, insects generally perform less well environmentally, whether compared to sophisticated meat substitutes or to legumes in a more raw form.
What can we conclude? On one hand, the trend is not to make insects a competitive alternative to meat, which is, after all, the core issue when discussing agriculture’s environmental impact. On the other hand, while insects generally perform better than meat as a whole from an environmental perspective, they remain a less efficient alternative compared to plant-based diets, on top of being far less popular.
In theory, a more virtuous farming method
Today, the main goal for many companies entering the insect farming industry is to feed pets and livestock such as chickens and farmed fish. While the environmental problems associated with livestock farming are far from limited to what the animals eat, their feed remains a central issue. At first glance, the solution offered by insect farming seems both ingenious and promising.
The idea is as follows: insects, which are very efficient at converting food into protein, are fed waste and then given to livestock, which are less demanding than humans. The excrement of insects, known as "frass", is then used as fertiliser. This system aligns perfectly with the concept of a circular economy, and in theory, would enable insect farming not only to recycle our waste but also to feed livestock without requiring land cultivation for this purpose. Unfortunately, this is not what we observe in practice.
In practice, suboptimal methods
While it is true that insects convert feed into protein more efficiently than livestock, this is because they are exothermic animals. It is therefore necessary to raise them in an environment with high temperatures (above 25°C). Otherwise, they risk growing much more slowly, or simply not surviving. However, heating millions of insects in a factory requires a lot of energy. If this energy is not decarbonized, it can contribute significantly to GHG emissions. In addition, for insects to grow correctly, they cannot just eat anything. A diet that is not very nutritious can lead to a high mortality rate or longer growth, and is therefore more costly.
Is it true that insects are fed on waste? While this is sometimes the case, the majority of producers rarely do so. The largest insect farms, such as those of InnovaFeed and Ÿnsect, mainly use agricultural by-products based on cereals, not waste. While humans rarely consume brewery grains, the same cannot be said for livestock. Insects, therefore, use resources that are already being used today. Several farms also directly use high-quality food, suitable for human consumption.
Difficulties in feeding insects with waste
A legitimate question is to ask why companies do not practice the circularity that they promote. There are many reasons:
At the regulatory level, the EU and the United Kingdom, for example, prohibit the use of food waste containing animal products for animal feed due to the risk of contamination.
Collecting food waste scattered across numerous sites requires significant investments in collection infrastructure.
Various sectors, such as biogas production, already use some organic waste, which limits its availability for insect feed.
The fluctuating composition of waste complicates its use, especially when livestock producers require a stable nutritional content.
In practice, very few insects are fed with feed that could not have been used directly to feed livestock or even humans. However, feeding insects with grain before feeding them to chickens is inherently less efficient than directly feeding the chickens with grain. Consequently, many different studies suggest that insects tend to have a greater environmental impact than the feed conventionally used in animal feed, particularly soy-based feed. For aquaculture, where more fishmeal is used, one study concludes that insects have an "enormous" impact in areas such as global warming, energy consumption, water consumption, and eutrophication.
To learn more about the issue of waste, see the summary of this recent study.
What about pets?
The topic of the environmental impact of pets sometimes arises in public debate. The scientific literature on the subject remains scarce, but some studies suggest that the environmental impact of our four-legged companions is far from negligible, largely due to their carnivorous diet. With nearly half of the current insect farming market dedicated to pet food, could pet food made partly from insects be a relevant solution?
Assessing the environmental impact of pet food is a thorny issue because it is generally produced from meat by-products, such as offal, heads, feet, or bones. While these parts can represent a significant portion of the carcass's weight, their commercial value is very low. The environmental impact of a carcass's different parts is typically estimated based on their economic value. To simplify, if a piece alone accounts for 20% of the economic value of the carcass, then we will attribute 20% of the environmental impact to it, even if it represents only 5% of the total weight. According to this method, the environmental impact of pet food is relatively low, and one of the few studies on the subject estimates that insect-based pet food emits two to ten times more GHG emissions.
As long as we continue to send a significant number of animals to slaughterhouses, the resulting by-products will enable us to feed pets with a much lower environmental footprint than what insect-based food could offer. The question might arise differently in a world where we consume much less meat. In this case, it is likely that a plant-based diet (which seems to be suitable for cats or dogs if supplemented) would still be less polluting than an insect-based alternative for the reasons mentioned above.
Conclusion
Our collective vision of insect farming is fundamentally flawed. We imagine that insects will replace meat on our plates, but in fact, insect farming for human consumption is a small part of the sector. Far from being a substitute for meat, insects should rather be seen as a new form of feed for livestock, as well as a premium ingredient in pet food.
This shift in perspective should also lead us to re-examine the favourable reputation of insects regarding their environmental impact.
As a substitute for meat, insects perform better on certain aspects but have higher impacts on others, while being globally inferior to plant-based alternatives.
As feed for livestock, outside of economically costly optimal practices that are currently very difficult to replicate on a large scale, insects tend to have a higher impact than conventionally used feed.
As pet food, it is unlikely that insects can outperform what is currently available in the short to medium term, as by-products used in dog and cat food have a much lower environmental impact than insect-based alternatives.
As the industry narrative is at odds with scientific evidence, the perception of insects as sustainable needs to be reevaluated.