Impact

An Open Letter to Media,

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Scaling the insect industry is one of the most (if not THE MOST) impactful climate actions we can take today. 

 

Benefit areas include: 

• improve biodiversity (in guts and soils), 

• reduce organics waste (nature uses insects not landfills),

• reuse biomass - insects consume would-be-waste and make 2 primary outputs: their larvae (premium protein, lipids to feed animals) and frass (a mixture of insect manure, exoskeleton, and beneficial soil microbes that restores soils destroyed by synthetic fertilizers)

• improve soil health,

• waste-to-value services,

• improve natural plant defense (lower need for pesticides),

• bio-filtration - insects don't bioaccumulate heavy metals and other toxins (we should use nature's filters),

• feed the growing pet food, poultry, and aquafeed industries,

• improve domestic food security (decrease reliance on imported synthetic fertilizers and more),

• improve bioregional food security (hyper-localized production improvements, or, in simpler words, insects work at big and small scales, improving food security for countries or within a single farm ecosystem)

• close protein gap, 

• improving crop nutrition (by restoring soils... it's all interconnected),

• improve animal welfare (chickens fed insects...what they eat in the wild... fare better than those stuffed with corn. Shocker. they need fewer antibiotics as well), 

• improve natural plant defense (lower the need for pesticides),

• the list goes on (I highly recommend this TEDx talk from 2017)

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Food is part of a system, and in America we scaled up parts of our food system while leaving others behind. From both environmental and economic angles, the common sense solution is to scale critical (ie keystone species that ecosystems collapse without) environmental services up to keep pace with the other sectors that have already been scaled up (like the meat industry.) 

 

Nature gets things right, and there's a "don't build the skyscraper on sand" analogy to be made here: all the investment $$$ into lab meat, genetically modified bacteria, or even ESG metrics won't mean *frass* unless we get our fundamentals right: organic waste can't continue. We must close the loop on agriculture. Insects are a keystone species, meaning ecosystems literally collapse without them.) 

 

Who am I?

I spent the last 12 years independently advocating for the insect industry under the persona Bugible, and I relish any opportunity to put that hat back on. (If so, lmk the best mailing address)

 
Next:

My hope is that you'll help integrate insects back into the story. This solution already exists, and we just need to educate folks about it (and dispel harmful conspiracies or reductionist dismissals like, "oh... now they just want us to eat bugs." 

 

Objectives: 

• 1)  improve general awareness of companies in the insect space and the industry as a whole (few media outlets cover insects, while thought-leaders like the World Economic Forum and McKinsey leave all mention of this critical sector out of charts and reporting).

• 2) be a resource to make objective #1 as seamless as possible for your team (I have a ton of white papers, intros, research folders, whatever you need to make this easy to cover) 

• 3) would love to get Chapul Farms (chapulfarms.com/chapul-farms) on your radar to be included as an industry-leading company scaling up economically and environmentally aligned, "common-sense" climate solutions by feeding waste to insects instead of landfills  (for now, quietly, but not for long) 

• 4) *bonus* you could even cover some important nuances, like plant-based potentially being a category failure (or at the least, improperly prioritized). Zooming out, we can see a trend toward extraction (depleting soils without restoring them, reducing biodiversity land/sea, crop monoculture, needing more and more chemicals). We want a future that is a 180 degree course-correction toward LIFE. Restoring ecosystem's abilities to heal themselves and be adaptive/resilient by replenishing critical microbes to guts and soils with insects. 

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The future of the planet hangs on if we'll get our sh*t together... kinda literally. And I really hope you're able to set a standard of solution-oriented, holistic reporting around climate action. I'd be happy to speak with anyone on your team if you have questions or need more info. 

 

Please let me know of anything else you'd need to run this as a story. 

 

Warmly,

Aly Moore

 

 

 

**** i've included links to some starter resources below ****

 

• Our TED talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsASL5hizMA

• Insect Trash Could Be a Farmer’s Treasure (NYT)

• How insects can feed a circular economy (Metabolic)

• The Impacts of Black Soldier Fly Frass on Nitrogen Availability, Microbial Activities, C Sequestration, and Plant Growth (White Paper)

• Exploring Black Soldier Fly Frass as Novel Fertilizer for Improved Growth, Yield, and Nitrogen Use Efficiency of Maize Under Field Conditions (White Paper)

• Suitability of Black Soldier Fly Frass as Soil Amendment and Implication for Organic Waste Hygienization (White Paper)

• Maggots: A taste of food's future (The Washington Post)

• Pets can help fight climate change with an insect-based diet (The Washington Post)

• Op-ed: Food Price Spikes Are About Much More than Ukraine

• The Politics of Protein

• The World is so Desperate for Manure that Even Human Waste is a Hot Commodity

• The Case for BSFL In Circular Agriculture

• Chapul Farms: Aquaculture & BSFL

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________________________

Aly Moore

she/her/hers

CCO | aly@chapulfarms.com

805-231-5363 | Linkedin | Instagram

 

 

1140 N Alpine Ave
McMinnville, OR 97128