Agriculture Committee on April 4th, 2022

[The Chair, Liberal, Kody Blois]

Thank you, Mr. Ammeter. We're at time. I apologize.

Thank you, Mr. Barlow. I appreciate it.

Mr. Ammeter, while we're here, I did speak with the clerk. We're having a little bit of a technical issue with your sound. Our interpreters are doing their best. When you're asked questions henceforth, if you could try to be a little bit slower in your delivery, that would probably help. That's what we've been asked to do. Thank you.

I will go now to Ms. Valdez for six minutes.

[Rechie Valdez, Liberal, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all of the witnesses for your testimony on this very important environmental study.

Mr. Wanger, congratulations on breaking ground at your new facility. The work you're doing at Oberland is really going to make a positive contribution to our planet.

We spoke to Mrs. Lockwood from Lockwood Farms in a previous committee meeting. She had made the choice on her farm to feed her hens with black soldier fly larvae, or BSFL, as opposed to using soy crops. She commented that the choice she made was for reasons like sustainability, being conscious about climate change and animal health and welfare.

Can you describe the main advantages for farmers to use BSFL in its different uses, like feeders, fats or protein?

[Dr. Greg Wanger]

BSFL, or black soldier fly larvae—I'm glad that you said black soldier fly larvae and not blackfly larvae, because we'd be run out of Canada if we actually started rearing those—is a very good species of insect to feed to multiple livestock animals, such as chickens, poultry, swine, and also aquaculture.

Particularly in chickens, one of the requirements they have for laying hens is high calcium. Calcium is important, of course, for shell development in laying hens. The soldier fly naturally accumulates very high amounts of calcium. As an insect species it accumulates thousands of ppm—parts per million—of calcium within its body, and when fed to livestock or poultry, it is a very readily absorbable bioavailable source of calcium.

Particularly for chickens and laying hens, the soldier fly is an ideal supplement to the local feeds. It's something that's been long known in the backyard chicken industry, but now, as more soldier fly farms grow to scale, we can start to supply some of the larger producers. That's really where our role is; it is providing good nutrition for those animals.

It's also been shown in the hog or swine industry that feeding a supplement of black soldier fly larvae to the hogs actually reduces intestinal distress and that leads to healthier and more productive pigs on the farm. It's likewise in the salmon industry. Out here in Nova Scotia, we're very linked to the aquaculture industry. Salmon naturally in the wild would spend a lot of their time in rivers eating insects in the rivers, so their metabolism is geared towards that kind of feedstock, so supplementing their feed with soldier fly is great as well.

One of the things that's really nice about the soldier fly is it's being fed on food waste and residuals coming out of other food manufacturing and grocery stores, so the food waste that would typically either end up in a landfill or low-grade compost, we are able to upcycle that and turn it into a very high-quality protein product that can feed multiple industries.

[Rechie Valdez, Liberal, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

Thank you.

Can you touch on—I think you mentioned it in your opening statement—the impact on the environment as it relates to BSFL's high production yield in how you're producing it?

[Dr. Greg Wanger]

I'm currently sitting in our pilot facility which is 7,000 square feet. That's the whole production facility. The actual area in our facility where we're rearing the soldier flies is about the size of a tennis court. In that area we are able to produce the same amount of protein as about 140 to 160 acres of corn.

Our new facility, which is located just across the street here, will be about three acres in size, or one and a half hectares. We will be able to produce the same amount as about 5,000 hectares of corn. It's a massive amount of production in a very small area. We can do this because we use the principles of vertical farming.

Our larvae are grown in bins that we can stack. The soldier fly has a tremendously rapid growth rate. It grows about 8,000 times its size in 10 days. One of my employees did the calculation and this is the equivalent of a human baby growing up to the size of a blue whale in 10 days. We have a massive production in a very small area. That's why we can do what we claim we can do.

[Rechie Valdez, Liberal, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

Thank you.

Europe is leading the way in this industry, so what assistance do you need to scale up or to help get more of your product into the market?

[Dr. Greg Wanger]

Definitely, one of the things we actually get from a lot of industry that are looking to sign offtake agreements with us on the protein and on the frass side of things is: Can you get to scale and how quickly can you get to scale? On the protein side, we have several large industrial players in the United States. Cargill and ADM are now looking at soldier flies.

Here in Canada we also have some very large industry groups looking at it. They're all waiting for the industry to scale. I mentioned that in Canada there are about 25 insect farms of various scales. Three to five of them are actually producing large volumes, and several of us are in the process of scaling to that first large-scale industrial process.

One of the things we do need is help getting a lot of these smaller companies out of the R and D phase and into their commercialization phase. In Atlantic Canada we've been very fortunate. There are a lot of government programs that really help a lot of these companies. I'm thinking about ACOA and the funding that we received early as a company that really helped us launch from the R and D phase into the first commercialization phase. It's projects like that where the government can really help.

The other is helping us with the research. Currently, we have about four projects going on with universities to help define and prove out our products. It's through grants, and I think about the most recent NSERC missions grants—

[The Chair, Liberal, Kody Blois]

I'm sorry. We're going to have to leave it there. I wanted to give you a few extra seconds, and I did, but I'm sure you'll get more questions.

I'll now give the floor to Mr. Perron for six minutes.

[Yves Perron, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'd like to thank all the witnesses for being with us.

Mr. Wanger, I'll let you continue your intervention.

You've heard the discussions about soils. There are questions about how we're going to get an accurate measurement and find out who we're rewarding, who we're not rewarding and who we're encouraging to improve.

In your sector, soil quality can't be measured. How do you see that? You seem to have an excellent yield for small acreage, but how can the government assess that?

[Dr. Greg Wanger]

The insect industry is one of those. We tick a lot of boxes, especially when it comes to climate change and meeting ESG goals for our partners, both upstream and downstream. There is a lot that we can do.

What can be done is helping with the data. It was mentioned earlier on. It's the collection of data. All of the soldier fly farms and insect farms in Canada have research projects that are currently going on.

With soil health, I mentioned the frass. We produce a fertilizer product that we alone have shown to be tremendously good at helping with soil health. It is getting to a farm before we try our applications and then during, and then it's a question of what we should be measuring. We need guidance and help to be told of the variables that we should be measuring and training the farmers to take the measurements correctly, because the adage of “garbage in, garbage out” is very applicable to data.

We need to make sure that all parties—industry parties, like me and others, the agriculture industry and the farmers—are working from the same playbook. That's crucial. That help comes a lot with the public-private partnerships between us and the university researchers.

[Yves Perron, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Marshall, a previous witness told us that when you remove organic matter from the soil, you have to ask how much of it you can remove. We were told to look at this as a whole and leave some of it to conserve carbon.

What about your production with biofuels in this regard? What insight can you give us about this?

[A. J. (Sandy) Marshall]

I fully agree with the point she made. It's absolutely critical that we maintain and ensure that we are doing sustainable harvesting, and not removing excessive amounts from and detrimentally impacting the soil. There are a number of studies that have been done that show there is a portion of the biomass that can be removed sustainably. That's where we have to put our focus.

Even once you have the science in place, it's really important that we have the traceability and the ability to track where we're moving the biomass from, so that we can continue to ensure that we're doing it sustainably and appropriately.

When I made my point about 50 million tonnes of agricultural biomass available, that is not the total amount of agricultural biomass that is available. That is based on a significantly reduced factor of the total biomass generated.

I would say that there are only a few crops where we generate sufficient biomass that there's an opportunity to remove it. In the case of us here in Ontario, it's really around wheat straw and corn stover, in particular, where you get excessive amounts of biomass that you can sufficiently remove without having long-term, detrimental effects on the soil.

[Yves Perron, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Thank you very much. Your clarifications are very enlightening.

My next question is for Mr. Ammeter or Mr. Carey.

You said that there was a lot of rotation in the west, but that there were problems with this in the east.

Can people in the east be encouraged to use the western business model? I'd like a 30‑second answer because I have another question.

[Mike Ammeter]

I don't know enough about eastern agriculture to suggest, and won't, how farmers run their operations. For us, it's very important. We follow fairly tight crop rotation guidelines. As I mentioned in my opening comments about wheat, canola, barley, peas and fava beans, that means on each individual parcel of land, they'll have one of those crops every so many years.

It's very important for us pest management—

[Yves Perron, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Thank you. I'm sorry for interrupting you, but I really want to ask my other question.

You mentioned AgriStability and AgriInvest, which you need to ensure stability. Other witnesses, Martin Caron, from the UPA, among others, mentioned the need to raise the AgriStability threshold to 85%. I know it's in the Prairie region where this proposal is stalled.

Can you speak to that? Do you agree with the request for an 85% AgriStability threshold?

[Mike Ammeter]

I think I would say yes, I agree with that, and the short answer is borne out by the fact that currently AgriStability's enrolment level is still very, very low. Even the changes that were brought in a year, or year and a half, ago haven't been enough to entice producers to bring the enrolment level up to what we're looking for. The shorter answer is that I think there's room to move on that for better participation.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kody Blois]

Thank you very much, Mr. Ammeter and Mr. Perron.

Now Mr. MacGregor has the floor for six minutes.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Thank you, Chair.

I'll turn to Mr. Wanger. I've been looking at your website, and the statistics that Oberland Agriscience posts there are very impressive, as is the fact that you only need 3,000 grams of feed to produce a kilogram of protein compared with 10,000 grams needed for beef. Similarly, the pounds of protein produced per acre of farmland are very impressive statistics.

I have a question: Where does your company source its feed for the larvae?

[Dr. Greg Wanger]

Our company right now sources its feed from the by-products of other food production industries. There are several organic producers in the Halifax area, and a lot of them are currently paying to have their organics removed by a waste-hauling company that takes them to a composting facility. Nova Scotia has one of the most long-standing composting programs in Canada, so there's already this idea of collecting these organics.

We get a portion of those now, and that's what we're taking in. We're taking in residuals from other production companies. Right now, under the Canadian Food Inspection Agency rules and guidelines, the insect industry is only allowed to take what is deemed pre-consumer organics. This is organic waste that comes out of the back end of a grocery store, such as that bruised apple you didn't eat, or from a food production facility such as a bakery or a brewery. We can take all of that as our feedstock, and that's what allows us to really help close the chain of the food industry here.

We take the organics. We turn them into high-quality protein. We're efficient, and the soldier fly is efficient—my staff is efficient as well, but the soldier fly is really the powerhouse of our industry—at converting that organic biomass into protein biomass. Of all the insect species grown around the world right now on an industrial scale, the soldier fly is really taking over as one of the main species because of its high efficiency and its great feed conversion ratios.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

In terms of the quantity, when you provide food to your larvae, how much are they able to reduce the mass of food? What is left over percentage-wise? Do you have some ballpark figures?

[Dr. Greg Wanger]

Sure, I have better than ballpark figures, yes.

For every tonne of wet organic material that comes through our door, we produce about 250 kilograms of wet larvae. This is the larvae prior to drying and turning it into protein powder. We also produce about 250 kilograms of frass, which is the fertilizer material, so it's quite a large reduction in organics.

There are several places around the world that are using the soldier fly as a manure mitigation strategy as well, and you can knock down manure volumes by about 70%. This is something that we're currently working on, a project with the local municipality here. We can't yet do that because of CFIA rules, but we're trying to push the envelope on the science.

It is about a 25% wet weight conversion of organic waste to soldier fly, and then we put it through a drying process, and, for every tonne, we end up with about 80 to 100 kilograms of dried powder.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Do you have an estimate on what that might translate into in terms of methane emissions reduction, all that wet organics now being used as a feedstock for insects? Of course, you're diverting it from a compost facility, a landfill, and preventing that particularly harmful greenhouse gas from being produced.

[Dr. Greg Wanger]

Yes. We do have that number. If I was to be asked next week, we will have our full LCA, which is just about to be completed for our facility.

One great thing about the insect industry and indoor agriculture in general is that because it's done indoors under a very controlled environment, we measure everything. We know exactly how many tonnes of organic come in. We know exactly the conversion rate. We know exactly how many kilograms of protein go out. We can measure the gases in the air that we are taking in to ventilate the facility and that we're releasing to the atmosphere.

From an agricultural perspective, one thing that Oberland really prides itself on is the data collection and sharing our data with both our downstream and upstream partners.

For the upstream partners, the grocery store chains and food producers have all set ESG targets that they are, in some cases, struggling to meet. We can help them by giving them a traceable sink for their organics.

On the downstream side, we have producers that are really trying to determine and minimize their ecological impacts and carbon footprint. For example, we're working with a local salmon farm here in Nova Scotia. One of the easiest ways to do that is to change the feed input of the salmon. We can give a traceable account of all the materials from the source all the way to the sink—from the organics all the way through to the salmon at the end.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Very quickly, I know a lot of companies are still in the start-up phase, but has it been pretty easy to get farmers on to your product?

[Dr. Greg Wanger]

The protein side is well established. I didn't mention early on that among the many other crises the globe is facing right now, the protein crisis is another one. With the rising middle class and more demand for high-quality foods, the push to higher protein foods is dramatic. The insect industry will play a role. We're not going to solve the problem, but we'll play a role.

On that end, we've seen massive uptake on our protein product, mainly in the pet food and agriculture industries. On the frass side, the insect industry has spent a lot of time working on the protein side and we are now, as an industry, really trying to push the frass and the fertilizer side.

On that end, there's still quite a lot of work to do to get wide-scale adoption. If you look at the data and the research we've had—you can come to my garden in Halifax and see—the results are tremendous, from what our fertilizer can do. We've shown about a 60% increase in root growth—