raised out in actual grass rather than in factory farm cages swear by the increased flavour you get from eggs laid by birds eating bugs, flower petals and whatever else they find in the yard. And gods only know where all of the various ingredients found in 'nutritional supplements' come from.

ya can't think too hard about food. it's all gross, really.

is a big one. this is so win win to eat our waste instead of bury it.
this is the next logical step from vermiculture.

i may try to do a black fly composter this summer, if i have time.
all kinds of clever diy things out there, built in chicken feeding and all.

i find this much less gross than feeding the stuff that the maggots eat straight to animals without that wonderful biological filter.

this is how mr darwin's process came out. insects used to feed the world in pretty much this way.

...were used that way for thousands of years, prior to modern medicine, and have been rediscovered by modern medicine as wound cleaners in this era of increasingly ineffective antibiotics. Maggots save peoples' lives! They also keep our environment relatively free of putrid, disease-carrying, dead flesh.

Would I eat them? God no! I have our DEEP-seated aversion to eating insects including (and perhaps especially) maggots, but, as an environmentalist and gardener, I've learned to respect and admire Mother Nature's awesome ability to turn garbage into nutrition and beauty. It's just the way it is. The muck is why we live. The wormier, and richer, and more garbage-laden the soil, the more sparkling, beautiful, edible life it creates.

Rich, wormy soil--composted from putrid, rotting table leavings and other "icky" stuff--produces the BEST vegetables and fruit imaginable--the tastiest, and the most packed-full of vitamins, minerals, fiber and other good things needed by the human body.

I was concerned about hummingbird feeders, which basically just provide sugar water to attract hummingbirds. Then I read up on it and found out that, a) the natural nectar that hummingbirds suck from flowers is basically sugar water, and b) hummingbirds have many other sources of food besides nectar or feeder sugar water--they eat insects, for instance--and these other sources provide them with the complex ingredients (proteins, vitamins, minerals, fats, etc.) that help fuel their tremendous energetic flight.

I knew, of course, that other birds eat insects, as well as leaves (they peck at young tender plants), seeds, fruits (gotta pick your plums before the birds get them all), gravels and other items, for a complex diet. But finding out that hummingbirds eat insects for variety brought home the notion of a COMPLEX diet, as well as the nutritiousness of insects.

It is far, far better that chickens, pigs and farmed fish are fed maggots and other insects than the toxic, planet-killing crap that modern agriculture--Big Chem, Big Ag--has inflicted on the land and on the critters we eat. Mother Nature TRANSFORMS "icky" things--putrid garbage, dirt, insects, worms--into lovely FOOD. Into us! When we interfere in that process--with chemicals, with monoculture--we are interfering with our own biology, to very bad effect. Other critters--the critters we eat--will NATURALLY seek out a COMPLEX diet--the best diet--if we let them.

The "more conventional" "cereals, fishmeal and soybeans" (that maggot farming will be replacing) are not just more costly--or, rather, the cost is not just money; they are bad farming and bad ecology. They have plunged the critters we eat and ourselves, and our entire planet, into ill health.

Of course, any mass production is worrisome. Mother Nature's magic is based on VARIETY. So that needs to be considered--evaluated, watched. How many mass productions of this or that have we been sold, that turned out to be detrimental, even horribly wrong-headed? Vast wheat fields leading to "dust bowls." Vast supermarkets leading to vast, toxic trash dumps and ocean trash filled with plastic packaging, not to mention hard, tasteless, nutritionally useless tomatoes! Vast freeways and numbers of vehicles leading to smog and gridlock. When it comes to human production, "vast" is almost inevitably bad. So we'll see about the maggot farms. But we need to change our notion that food should be antiseptic. The very best food comes from "ick."

People can eat the bugs just fine. Running them through a cow or a pig first just reduces the efficiency dramatically.

At least with chickens you'd get the eggs and the meat.

Wonderful idea!

don't knock them until you try them.

and what I find funny is: as humans, we eat all kinds of really weird stuff, but yet people get the heebies over eating insects. LOL

I couldn't resist.

A bucket with the bottom replaced by fine wire mesh hangs in the corner of their outdoor enclosure. When I have things I can't compost (old meat, cheese, gophers I trap or shoot on my garden) I place them in it. Flies lay eggs, and maggots fall out through the mesh for the chickens. They go nuts for them!

I've heard of people collecting roadkill for this purpose, but I'm not that desperate for free chicken feed.