Felix Collins ‘ work would not be appropriate for anyone who is sceptical about flies.
The founder and boss of a company called Full CircleBiotechnology, he is in charge of 20 million black soldier fly larvae.
Based at a smaller, indoor center on the fringes of Bangkok, the strong rears the beetles to produce dog supply for the government’s shrimp and animal farms.
The eggs, which live in a dark, warm and humid setting, pull on fruit and vegetable spend sourced from food and drink companies, before being harvested and combined with microbial bacteria and fungi.
He also asserts that the insect-based serve produced by the company has a” 100 times lower carbon footprint than soymeal.”
Founded in 2019, Full Circlenow employs 14 people, and supplies 49 farms across Thailand. It wants to increase this, but faces a hurdle – soybean-based feed is currently substantially cheaper.
To try to reduce the price of its feed, Full Circleis now turning to AI to help maximise production at a lower cost. To do this it is training an AI system to study all available past and present data on insect farming to determine and then continuously fine tune the best methods.
This may range from heat to food number, the ideal location for the eggs to quickly and accurately count hundreds of flies, and whether to offer new strains or species.
” AI can help us speed up the process of trial and error, helping us overcome obstacles, and develop a thorough enough understanding of insect production, to be reasonably confident that our production is optimised”, says Mr Collins.
” AI can assist us in processing, recording, and understanding every insect farming attempt to date, and make sure that each successive crop we grow has the potential to produce a larger and healthier crop.”
Some 5, 000 miles away in Lithuania, insect farm software provider Cogastro is also working on an AI- based system. The AI upgrade will allow the monitoring system to learn, adapt, and make changes within an insect farm for itself. It currently sells monitoring software that automatically gathers data for users to analyze.
Cogastro claims it is not rushing the development of the AI, but rather that it intends to do so in the next three years.
Mante Sidlauskaite, the organization’s founder and CEO, says she is cautious of companies in the field who claim to have AI systems in place. We have been here for five years, and we know from our example how long it takes to create a layer of software.
It has taken us time to collaborate with as many businesses as possible on a global scale to learn about the differences and similarities of their processes so that we could standardize our data models to address their overlapping needs. So we now have a foundation on which to build AI solutions.
” But when start-ups emerge just yesterday and then announce that they have something in the pipeline, they cannot have an accurate AI model before they begin training it, and you need some data, and to have data you need to have some customers first,” he said.
She continues by expressing her concern about the excessive use of the buzzword” AI” without companies explaining how their AI supposedly functions.
It is working with a Singapore-based expert in the field, Simon Christofides, to develop its AI system back at Full Circle.
According to Mr. Collins, there is still much to learn, and that the use of AI can quickly speed up this process because black soldier fly larvae have only been farmed commercially over the past ten and a half.
” Rice farmers are still trying to create the perfect crop after 13, 500 years of passed down generational learning”, he says. ” Black soldier fly larvae have been farmed for 0.1 % of the time rice has been grown, and that’s reflected in our current understanding”.
Mr. Collins goes on to say that the firm’s strategy will be to use AI to use data points from millions of data points to crunch insights that no human could ever obtain.
He continues,” Sometimes you just need to leave the flies to get on with things on their own,” he continues. similar to the breeding process, where mature flies mat on green ribbons laid out to reflect their territorial preferences.
” You need to consider their social and behavioural dynamics as animals”, says Mr Collins.