Manipulating diet content and context to improve edible insect farming yield

控制饮食内容和环境以提高食用昆虫养殖产量

• 批准号: 568647-2021
• 负责人: Bertram, SusanSM
• 金额: $ 7.91万
• 依托单位: Carleton University
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Alliance Grants
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2022-01-01 至 2023-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=745140
• 关键词: Manipulating; diet; content; context; improve

Food security is a global concern and Canada's current agricultural model is not adequately positioned to support our growing needs. Insects are nutritious, protein rich, and their production requires less resources than vertebrate protein sources. Demand for insects as food and feed is rapidly rising in North America. A primary goal of our Alliance project is to increase yield (the number of crickets harvested per unit area and/or time). Cricket farms struggle with how best to increase yield to meet demand as it is difficult to disentangle the effects of the highly variable farm environment (e.g., temperature and humidity fluctuations, pests, personnel changes) from controlled variables like diet composition. Together with Entomo Farms, we have identified key concerns surrounding increasing yield that cannot be addressed without our support. We will use our laboratory environment to determine how to best manipulate diet content (Goal 1) and environmental context (Goal 2) to improve rearing facilities and practices. We will then test our findings directly at Entomo Farms (Goal 3). Specifically, we will identify the protein to carbohydrate ratio and lipid to phosphorus to vitamin C ratio, along with the ideal plant-based protein and the optimal dietary particle size required to maximize yield. Insect growth is also heavily influenced by temperature, and since temperature sensitivity of physiological systems can differ, the effects of temperature will depend on diet. We will thus determine how diet and temperature interact to impact yield. Further, because Entomo Farm's rearing practices create a complex social environment with resource competition produced through density, we will also determine the effect of rearing density and diet on growth and survival in our controlled laboratory setting. To scale findings up to the active farm environment, the top diet formulations from Goals 1&2 will be tested at Entomo Farms to ensure yields increase. This will enable the company to confirm our findings scale to the complex farm environment, prior to Entomo tweaking the approaches used on their entire production line. Our goal is to ensure Entomo's yield is increased by at least 25% to meet growing demand for their products and contribute to global food security.

粮食安全是全球关注的问题，加拿大当前的农业模式不足以满足我们不断增长的需求。昆虫营养丰富，蛋白质丰富，其生产所需的资源比脊椎动物蛋白质来源少。北美对昆虫作为食物和饲料的需求正在迅速增长。我们联盟项目的主要目标是提高产量（单位面积和/或时间收获的蟋蟀数量）。蟋蟀养殖场正在努力解决如何最好地提高产量以满足需求的问题，因为很难将高度变化的农场环境（例如温度和湿度波动、害虫、人员变化）与饮食成分等受控变量的影响分开。我们与 Entomo Farms 一起确定了有关提高产量的关键问题，如果没有我们的支持，这些问题就无法解决。我们将利用我们的实验室环境来确定如何最好地控制饮食内容（目标 1）和环境背景（目标 2），以改善饲养设施和实践。然后我们将直接在 Entomo 农场测试我们的发现（目标 3）。具体来说，我们将确定蛋白质与碳水化合物的比例以及脂质与磷与维生素 C 的比例，以及理想的植物性蛋白质和最大化产量所需的最佳膳食颗粒大小。昆虫的生长也深受温度的影响，由于生理系统的温度敏感性可能不同，温度的影响将取决于饮食。因此，我们将确定饮食和温度如何相互作用以影响产量。此外，由于 Entomo 农场的饲养实践创造了一个复杂的社会环境，通过密度产生资源竞争，我们还将在受控实验室环境中确定饲养密度和饮食对生长和生存的影响。为了将研究结果扩展到活跃的农场环境中，目标 1 和 2 中的顶级日粮配方将在 Entomo 农场进行测试，以确保产量增加。这将使该公司能够在 Entomo 调整整个生产线上使用的方法之前确认我们的研究结果适用于复杂的农场环境。我们的目标是确保 Entomo 的产量提高至少 25%，以满足对其产品不断增长的需求，并为全球粮食安全做出贡献。