Urban Feed Co is a project to produce sustainable livestock feed from insects that eat wide variety of nutrient wastes. These insects are called black soldier flies, or hermetia illucens, and while native to the tropics, they now live on every inhabited continent. The insect larvae are 30-50% protein. They contain lauric acid, also a major constituent in coconut oil, which kills harmful pathogens like bacteria, viruses and fungi. 

At left in the photo above is Dr. Robert Logan, Direct of Research at the College of Arts, Science, and Education in Portland, Jamaica, a great mentor. The college bought one of our units and we donated our time to conduct a study with the students in the photo. One of the highlights was developing a way for the students to log data on old school “dumb” phones. They would text a message with a few bits of info: weight of food, weight of bugs, temperature and pH. A service would strip this data from the email and send it to a simple script I wrote in php. The script would append a line to a .csv file on the server. And finally, a google spreadsheets function would grab this data from the server and update the sheets and charts so the team could analyze progress.

For more info, visit UrbanFeedCo.com.