More than the printed sheet
The businesses elsewhere, in full
Protix (Netherlands). In 2019 Protix opened, in Bergen op Zoom, what it calls the world’s first industrial insect plant. It feeds the larvae on leftovers from food factories and sells the protein and fat made from them to companies that make pet food, fish feed and livestock feed. In October 2023 Tyson Foods, the American meat company, bought a minority share; with the existing investors it put in €55 million, and the two agreed to build a plant in the United States, three to four times the size of the Dutch one. The site had not been chosen then; the plant was meant to start towards the end of 2025, and we found no report that it has. Protix itself expects its income to reach about €1 billion only by 2035: even the biggest insect farms are a long bet.
InsectiPro (Kenya). Talash Huijbers studied food and agribusiness in the Netherlands and set out to farm fish. She found that feed, and above all the protein in it, was what made fish farming costly, so in 2018 she started raising black soldier flies instead, on one leased acre at Red Hill, Limuru, with her first flies from icipe, the insect research centre in Nairobi. By 2024 it ran more than 2,000 crates in over 12 greenhouses and took in over 60 tonnes of waste a day; it sold its feed at 130 Kenyan shillings a kilo, through depots in Meru and Bomet and had added crickets as a snack. It has needed more than US$2 million of investment and is still looking for more.
Loopworm (India). Ankit Alok Bagaria and Abhi Gawri, graduates of IIT Roorkee, began in 2019 by talking to fish and poultry farmers. For three years they lived on government grants and foundation money while a pilot made about 50 kg of insects a day and they tested feed recipes. In 2022 they raised US$3.4 million for a factory in north Bengaluru. Since then they have added silkworms to the black soldier fly, run a plant that can process 6,000 tonnes a year, and sell mostly abroad, to makers of fish, salmon and pet feed in Europe, South America and South-East Asia. Their income in 2024–25 was ₹4.5 crore, small next to the US$6.65 million raised: insect feed takes years to pay.
What a famous failure teaches
France’s Ÿnsect raised over US$600 million and built a giant factory before it had shown it could make insect protein cheaply. Feed is bought on price, and buyers would not pay more because it was greener; its insects ate grain by-products that could already go into feed, so they added a costly step; then energy and interest costs rose. In December 2025 a French court ordered the company to be wound up. A rival that started small and grew step by step is reported to be doing better.
For a farm in Nepal the lessons are the same at a smaller size: feed the larvae on waste nobody else can use, ideally waste someone pays you to take; sell to the farmers next door first; and grow only once each batch pays for itself.
The money, worked through
Step 1: what comes out of a tonne of waste. A guide by Eawag, the Swiss water research institute (2021), says larvae come to about 10–20% of the waste’s weight, and drying takes away about 70% of the larvae’s weight. So 1,000 kg of waste gives 100–200 kg of fresh larvae, and 100–200 × 0.3 = 30–60 kg of dried larvae.
Step 2: what that sells for. The Bhardeu farm sold dried larvae at Rs 70 a kilo (2023). 30–60 kg × Rs 70 = Rs 2,100–4,200 from each tonne of waste.
Step 3: how much waste a real farm needs. Bhardeu expected 3,500 kg a cycle. If that is dried larvae, by the same rates it needs 3,500 ÷ 0.06 = about 58 tonnes to 3,500 ÷ 0.03 = about 117 tonnes of waste a cycle: roughly 1–2.6 tonnes every day over a 45–60-day cycle. A small farm must first find a steady supply of waste.
Step 4: the second product. The same guide says each tonne of waste also leaves 200–400 kg of frass. We found no reliable price for frass in Nepal: ask agrovet shops what compost or vermicompost sells for.
Step 5: the costs. No reliable figure for a small farm: price the shed, crates, winter heat, drying, carrying the waste and wages yourself.
Step 6: is it cheaper than what farmers use now? We found no reliable current price for soybean meal or fishmeal in Nepal; ask a feed shop. Dried larvae are about 30–40% protein (Eawag), so compare the price of a kilo of protein, not of a kilo of feed.
Other places in Nepal it could fit
Chitwan. In the government’s 2015 poultry survey, Chitwan had 1,923 commercial poultry farms and laid 68% of Nepal’s eggs; its poultry trade was worth about Rs 10 billion a year. Feed buyers are close together, it is warm, and the Bhardeu farm’s first larvae came from there. The charity behind Bhardeu was considering Chitwan or Kailali for its next farm because their climate suits the larvae better (Reuters, 2023).
Bara. A fisheries “super zone” under the government’s agriculture modernisation project, with 4,340 fish ponds on 1,765 hectares, where the warm water allows three harvests a year. Nepal doesn’t make enough fish feed, so Bara’s farmers buy costlier feed from India (Kathmandu Post, 2018).
The Kathmandu Valley has the most waste, about 1,200 tonnes a day, but its winters are cold for the larvae, which grow best at 24–30 °C. Bhardeu keeps them in cages with heating panels, and its backers were still testing how well the larvae do in the cold.
Questions people ask
- Isn’t it dirty? Will the flies spread disease?
- The adult flies don’t eat at all and live about a week; they only need water. Studies show feeding waste to the larvae kills disease bacteria such as Salmonella (Eawag, 2021). The women at Bhardeu first found the larvae disgusting and handled them with confidence after training.
- Can I do it in a hill town?
- Yes, but you must keep them warm. The larvae grow best at 24–30 °C; when it is colder they eat less and grow slowly (Eawag). Bhardeu, in Lalitpur, uses cages with heating panels.
- Where do I get my first flies?
- Bhardeu’s came from Chitwan. The National Innovation Center lists training, young larvae and farm designs, though its page showed them as not available when we checked in October 2026, so ask before you plan around it.
- Do I need a licence to sell insect feed?
- Nepal’s Feed Act of 2033 BS (1976) says anyone who makes, sells or supplies animal feed needs a licence, and a committee sets feed standards. We found no rule written for insects, so ask the livestock office before you sell.
Related
Sources for this part
The sheet’s own sources are listed on it, above.
