Page 1833 - Week 05 - Thursday, 10 May 2018
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couple of weeks ago, I can tell you is indigenous to Australia and does not have any of the health concerns of the common blowfly.
The company started based on Olympia’s interest in sustainable agriculture. She found that 70 per cent of the production costs for animal farmers are feed, and while she had originally planned to do animal farming the cost of that was just too high. With the help of an ACT innovation grant in 2016, Olympia has grown her business to an efficient, local, closed system that is water efficient and requires no arable land. She is, in fact, based in a warehouse in Fyshwick.
Her home-grown maggots are bred and fed with local food waste and are turned into food for, amongst others, some of the 170,000 backyard chickens in Canberra. For maggot farming, one tonne of maggots consumes 2½ tonnes of food waste, thus saving it from landfill. This then produces 180 kilograms of maggot meal with less than one litre of water needed per kilo of protein. These clever little critters also eat aerobically; so they do not smell.
There are certainly people who advocate for insects to be included as part of the human food chain and I think they do have a point. Insects are a sustainable protein source and in many countries and cultures they have been included in people’s diets for millennia. More recently I believe that up-market restaurants are marketing insects as the next great culinary trend.
On this of course I should note that climate change is making farming more difficult due to more variable and extreme conditions. There is the risk of food shortages into the future as arable land becomes more scarce and the global population continues to boom. A staggering one-third of food produced worldwide and 20 per cent of food in Australia becomes waste. Olympia Yargers’s maggot farm and institutions like that can make good use of the waste. Her company has developed decentralised modular options so that the maggots can be grown close to both the food waste sources and the stockfeed end users.
On Tuesday the government released the waste feasibility study and as part of this made a renewed commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by focusing on the reduction of organic material from landfill. GOTERRA could be part of how this happens. There clearly is an actual synergy here and hopefully we are going to hear more about Olympia’s business in the future.
It is, of course, imperative that we reduce our impact on the planet. This could be one currently small—possibly to become large—way that the people of the ACT and people elsewhere do so, by moving into maggot farming.
Tuggeranong 55 Plus Club
Legislative Assembly—visitors
MS J BURCH (Brindabella) (4.55): Tonight I just want to let the Assembly know that I was very pleased to join members of the committee of the Tuggeranong 55 Plus Club just recently in Tuggeranong as they celebrated their 10th birthday. I have had a long association with the Tuggeranong 55 club. I was there to turn the first sod when
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