Lowemore Kuwana enthusiastically opens one of the containers in his back yard and shows hundreds of little white worms swarming in rotten, smelly quail poo. “I don’t even smell it anymore”, the Zimbabwean says with a big smile. His wife however, who is a beauty therapist, just can’t get used to the crawling maggots, he adds.

The dirtier the better

The 40-year-old farmer keeps 150 chickens and a thousand quails. “Because of the soaring feed prices, due to draught caused by El Nino, I started looking for alternatives to feed my poultry and that’s when I heard about maggot production”, the slender Zimbabwean with short frizzy hair and a beard says while collecting poo under the quail cages which he then drops into white buckets to then add water. “If the mix is dirty enough, it will attract lots of flies immediately, who will lay hundreds of eggs that will transform into maggots in just one day”, he chuckles.

When the maggots are about ten days old, he feeds them to his chicken. “They love them more than their old feed”, the Zimbabwean assures us while emptying a container of crawling larva gunk on the sand floor, immediately followed by a chicken run on the white worms picking them with their beaks. For his quails, he first lets the maggots dry in the sun. “These birds are more sensitive to diseases than chicken, possibly transmitted by the maggots, so I have to be a bit more cautious.”

Maggots richer in protein than soy

“The protein portion of feed is always most expensive”, Victor Marufu of the Zimbabwe Organic and Natural Food Association explains. In chick feed this is normally made up out of soy, fish flour or grinded carcasses, all expensive ingredients as they are not produced in Zimbabwe and therefore have to be imported. “Over here soy costs around $ 500 per ton. So maggots are a much cheaper alternative that even contain five percent more protein than soy”, Marufu says in his office in the city center of the Zimbabwean capital of Harare.

Because a growing number of Zimbabwean farmers are struggling with the extreme rise in feed prices, the organization has recently started to offer courses to learn how to best produce maggots. “Zimbabwean farmers spend eighty percent of their costs on feed. Changing to maggot production can really make a difference”, Marufu says.

Production on industrial scale

Zim Earthworm Farms, a Zimbabwean company specialized in the production of earthworms, is currently researching the production of maggots on an industrial scale after a year of running trials. “We have been producing a sizeable amount of maggots that are dried in the biogas digester and then mixed with the corn-based feed we already produce,” chief executive Ephrem Whingwiri tells. The mixed feed, which can also be fed to pigs and fish, sustains about 300 chickens at Zim Earthworm Farms, and now Whingwiri is looking to expand.

The industrial process of producing maggot-based stock feed – using a series of tanks in a purpose-built structure – generates five times less greenhouse gas emissions than the production of soy or corn stock feed, according to the Zimbabwean Chinhoyi University. For every ton of stock feed made from maggots, around 2 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent is emitted, compared with around 10 tons for soy-based feed. Experts say maggot production could help cut Zimbabwe’s annual emissions of 417 gigatons of methane, a vigorous greenhouse gas.

Interesting for the whole of Africa

“Maggots can be interesting for the whole of Africa”, Marufu states. “Not only as cheap feed but they can also contribute to mitigating the huge waste problem”, the Zimbabwean believes. “Disadvantaged youth in urban areas, for example, could start collecting organic waste in order to produce maggots. By selling the maggots and the organic fertilizer byproduct, they could earn a stable income. Furthermore, our water treatment plants are facing big problems because the primary sludge attracts lots of flies, while you easily could use maggots to process the waste coming from the water.”

Also Kuwana is overjoyed with his maggots production. “My chickens are growing more than ever,” says the Zimbabwean who sells his so-called roadrunners – a slightly larger chicken species able to run faster having longer legs – for as much as eight to ten dollars each. “On top of that, I earn about a hundred dollars a day with the sale of quail eggs while feeding them costs me much less and with their poo I produce maggots”, the farmer says while he adds with a big smile: “Maggots are big business. Even the people who think they are disgusting, admit that now.”

Images by Jeroen van Loon

Source:http://www.your-bizbook.com/