It all started when I was standing at the back of a slaughter house with a lot of flies around and I remembered that as a young boy back in the north of England there were two ways of catching a fish - one was with a fly at the end of the line; the other a maggot. We didn't invent the process, mother nature did.
In starting AgriProtein there were several years of abject failure. It takes a lot to get flies to live together happily and there was lots of failure before we could industrialise the process. Today there are over eight billion flies in the factory.
We can't live without flies. Flies bring down waste. That's their role in nature. Putting all our food and organic waste into a [landfill] generates bacteria, which sooner or later contaminates our water.We breed the Black Soldier fly, it's not the common house fly. The Black Soldier fly lives outside and never comes inside. You'd never see one on waste because they don't eat as an adult [they mostly eat in the larval stage] and live for a very short time. As an adult their sole job is to mate and lay more eggs.
We try to re-create the ideal place for them to lay as they would in nature, but in a cage. It's a bio-secure facility and we don't let flies escape as the breeding stock are valuable to us.
In nature the life cycle of a Black Soldier fly is between 28 and 29 days and in the factory 22 days.
The more time you spend with flies and the friendlier you get with them, the more you understand them. I know too much about flies and have written a book on them - The Story of the Fly: How it Could Save the World (Cheviot Publishing).
Roughly a third of the fish taken out of the sea is ground up for fish meal to feed animals. Our ocean fish stocks are collapsing, and 57% of the world's fisheries are already fully exploited...