An interesting project (link) to control swine manure by half.
This project employs black soldier fly larvae to digest swine manure, thus reducing the amount of manure by half, reducing nutrients, eliminating house fly breeding, reducing odor and producing a value-added product that may be used as an animal feed ingredient.
The use of fly larvae, or maggots, to digest manure has been widely studied; however, the cost of separating the larvae or pupae from manure residues made systems that use fly larvae to treat manure expensive. The researchers involved in this project have developed a simple system to force black soldier fly prepupae to self-harvest with no external energy requirements, making industrial scale culture on manure practical with this native, non-pest fly. This system can be readily retrofitted to existing swine facilities using the manure handling belt proposed by Gannett Fleming Inc.
