From riaanb@iafrica.com Wed Aug 11 17:07:31 1999 Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 10:34:33 +0200 From: Riaan Botes To: sanet-mg@ces.ncsu.edu Subject: RE: maggots, um yummy [ The following text is in the "iso-8859-1" character set. ] [ Your display is set for the "US-ASCII" character set. ] [ Some characters may be displayed incorrectly. ] Hi I think this is my first post to this group. I have been lurking here for over a year - very interesting. |We were thinking of growing maggots for food, dry them and |grind them up. |Insects, the food for the next millenium. Join the leading edge. In Benin, West Africa, there is a sustainable agric college called Songhai. They use maggots in a very interesting manner. I stand corrected on the figures, but as I recall them: They have an area of about 20m x 30m divided up into 1m x 1m recesses about 15cm deep and each "hole/bin" is surrounded by a channel. Into these bins go kitchen offal, dead rodents, lizards, pig sty gunk etc. etc. and vegetable refuse. All mixed together - a fly gourmet diner. The flies lay eggs, maggots hatch and eat/process this stuff and when the maggots cannot find any food left in these bins, they crawl out in search of more. They then fall into the channels where they are collected and put in buckets. Once all the maggots have left a bin, the content is removed and then new mix added. 1. The maggots are collected by the elderly in the community - giving them the opportunity to contribute - instead of being sidelined. 2. The remnant material from the bins is compost and this is reworked into the communal gardens. 3. It tends to concentrate the flies around these bins and keeps them away from the rest of the area, especially food preparation areas. 4. Maggots are 70% protein 5. 1 ton gunk produces 7 tons of maggots 6. Used as fish food in aquaculture they produce about 2 tons of Tilapia, which are harvested and sold to the surrounding communities. The project director has a saying ".. that there is no free lunch for anyone here. Even the flies have to work for their food". Cheers Riaan To Unsubscribe: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command "unsubscribe sanet-mg". If you receive the digest format, use the command "unsubscribe sanet-mg-digest". To Subscribe to Digest: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command "subscribe sanet-mg-digest". All messages to sanet-mg are archived at: http://www.sare.org/san/htdocs/hypermail