Awesome video! Daniel makes a very good point, BSF is much better for small scale farms with less than 100 chickens. For anybody interested in black soldier fly production, here are a few tips to reduce the labor In the video, Daniel shows a black soldier fly production setup with nets. The method with nets is very labor intensive because you must keep each life cycle of the soldier fly separated and move everything around at specific times... This way you produce large amounts of BSF in batches. Good for selling... but lots of labor. If you are producing BSF to feed your own animals, then there are less labor-intensive methods you can use. There is a method to produce black soldier fly passively aside from acquiring the food waste. You can even automate the feeding of the chickens. The labor consists of acquiring fruit tree waste such as mangos, and putting this waste in a special-shaped container close to the chickens who will eat the BSF. In this method, BSF is produced constantly instead of in batches. The BSF grows inside the container, and as it matures it will naturally crawl out of the container. At this point it can "crawl" to an area accessible by chickens, who will eat the soldier fly. The container will naturally maintain a colony of BSF because BSF eat other maggots and most competing organisms. But why does the BSF crawl out of the container? It is all about the shape of the container. The container has a ramp on the inside which starts at the bottom and goes all the way to the top, where there is a hole for the BSF to fall out of the container. The BSF likes to eat where the rotten liquid is at the bottom of the food waste pile. When they become mature, they crawl up high. By putting a ramp in their container, you enable them to come out of the container naturally when they are ready to pupate. The result is a container or a hole that passively produces and deposits chicken food, provided you keep the food waste stocked. You can either buy a big plastic tub or dig a hole. Each hole or container should be anywhere from 3'x3'x3x' to 5'x5'x5'. If you dig a hole you will need to line the hole with cement to force the BSF to crawl out. If you just dig a hole, you will lose many BSF into the dirt. This method is much easier to scale, because you do not need to keep each BSF life cycle separate, and there is no labor to feed the chickens because you can create short pipes that deposit the BSF where the chickens can eat it. The labor required is the maintenance and food waste supply. Fruit trees are ideal. BSF absolutely loves mango and you can create a population of BSF in the tropics by cutting up 10 mangos in a container with a few holes in the top and letting it rot. The BSF will naturally find the mango if they are local in your area. (They are local almost everywhere).

When we had chickens on our farm, I used to allow them to free range wander during the day then only feed in the evening. They had access to a couple of dams for water and 25 acres of woodland to forage.The swarm of chickens would flock to my call to feed and then be protected during the nights. We had fat, happy chickens. I see that your farm has rich fertile soil too which i s an advantage to growing your own feed.

My good friend. I remember when you use to do it 2years ago. Your dedication on the farm made me to buy lands for farming. I have followed you for years now. Keep the good work

Am a black soldier fly farmer here in uganda and currently producing close to 1tn of larvae a week

I've fed soldier fly larva that were dried, not live. Many people here (california, USA) raise mealworms for their birds, but as you say; it depends how much space it takes, and what the percentage of protein is. We've cut grass, weeds, stalks, garden trimmings and vegetable waste with ground dried eggshells. Yes, we searched through a lot of local possible resources, and they ended up getting an interesting mix. For a year, I also worked helping a caterer and came home frequently with leftover banquet food. LOL Things you and I couldn't afford in a restaurant....they ate like queens for a time! (It was "legally unsafe for human consumption" and we were only given it to give to our chickens.) NICE eggs, and YES I heard the "I laid an egg" song! hahaha I love hearing your girls! I've had chickens over the years, rarely more than 40. Thank you for sharing, it's a problem everyone caring for chickens faces! We can't afford to BUY all the feed!

BSF is really just a composting technique that happens to create supplemental protein. Set up worm bins with bsf on top. You can trade the resulting vermicompost to your feed farmers. One of the best ways to take care of your chicken litter.

If you put ramps, that lead to fall offs into buckets, you can get the Soldier flies to collect themselves, This is usually how folks harvest black soldier flies, as when they are ready, they stop eating, and collect into the buckets by climbing out of the food. Just have to look up designs, and make a large enough system with plenty of ways for them to isolate into the buckets, and you could just throw waste into a bin, and collect them each day easy.

Hi Dr. Daniel, i have read through quite a number of comments here and my submission would be, Since your farm has expanded beyond what it used to be, you should out source the supply of larvae to another farmer who will be willing to supply you with the needed quantity for your bird. its either you focus on the chicken for now, because they both need a lot of attentions (Chicken and BSF) at the same time. I support those that said your title was not properly coined too, this could scare people. i wish you the best bro...let us unluck the best of us. Am Dennis Chidi - Nigeria

This channel is awesome!!! I already love homesteading channels and only mostly get to see farms from North America. Super happy to find Farm Up!

BSF are also able to compost chicken poop as they do not completely digest their feed leaving 30% available for re-composters. When I had chickens , hubby made a concrete -casket' system with ramps which the collected poops were fed into. Realize scale up is problematic but for smaller flocks (under 50) worked well. Very healthy, they loved the BSF and produced well. Just a thought. Recompiling their poop plus other waste is a good system. Hope that this helps.

Maize prices in Nigeria quadrupled during the pandemic lockdowns in 2020 and have not gone down since. Now I farm my own maize, but we have a challenge with herdsmen.

Excellent video! Beautiful flock and well done on your explanations. Only thing I have to add, careful with the antibiotics. Doxicyclin is an antibiotic we use as humans and you don’t want to breed resistant strains within your flock that could jump species. Your camera presence is great and the flow through the video was awesome

I have absolutely no idea why I'm watching this or got recommended it, but there's something about dude that's got me hooked

I saw this channel for the first time now and I liked you from the first 2 minutes. And by the end, I was in love with the content. Great work. Im glad someone is finally educating these hipster city boys from the west on how a farm actually looks like.

If you have a source for food scraps from restaurants, you can build a solar cooker to heat and disinfect the meat. (Directions on internet) Then let the food cool and give it to the chickens. Pretty soon it will attract insects. If you have a local beer brewery, you can feed them leftover malt and hops. But this feed situation is a nightmare. I'm going to start grinding mesquite pods. There are probably native plants in your area with roots or seeds you can grind up. Acorns are good, but its a multi-step process

Interesting to hear your challenges with BSFL. When I started farming them I faced many challenges but I can tell you now I produce about 100kg a day without much effort and with no-one helping me at all. I have sourced plenty of organic feed for them each day (all free) and I have tweaked my farm setup so it works with minimum effort. I will be using them to supplement the feed in my new chicken farm this year.

Greetings Doc, why couldn’t your title read “Why I’ve Stopped My BSF Production?” Your title makes it seem as if the BSF are resulting in diseases or low conversion rate?

Thank you for experimenting and educating others on what didn't work out well! Respect and gratitude!

Excellent content.. engaging, straightforward & practical! Thank you! 🐔

The Ammonia produced by the chicken excrement is a serious issue when it comes to the health of the chickens .. Which means constant cleaning of the coup .. One of the other measures to lower the Ammonia is to add airflow through the coup from the floor to the top of the coup .. The airflow doesn't need to be high but it does need to be done .. Many farmers have movable coups which tractors can pull from one place to another to reduce the ammonia which requires flat ground .. This is another good method to help the chickens breath fresh air ..

Hello Daniel, There are farmers that can supply you with the quantities of BSF feed you need. Maybe you do not need to actually do it yourself.

The easiest way to get maggots for chickens is directly from the source. Rotational grazing of cattle is a great way to improve soil health and therefore fodder yields. Then 3 days after the cattle have gone through a patch, follow through with your chickens. They’ll go to town eating the maggots that have hatched in the dung. Furthermore, the chickens will also be eating other bugs like beetles, worms and ants. Further diversifying their feedstock and improving the health and vitality of the chickens.

That's crazy. It got so expensive for maze. Would it have helped to grow your own maze? Wild situation, I know that a lot of a chickens diet is going to require some grain and protein from grazing on bugs. You've got so many beautiful healthy chickens, place is so clean there can't be anything other than the feed effecting them so. Thank you for sharing.

You are doing quite a job with that many birds. best of luck moving forward!

Cheers from Canada. Thank you being so thorough!

From the day you mentioned using fly larvae I knew it was not practical. I am a feedmilling engineer that worked in mills poducing more than 20 tons per hour, a quick calculation and I knew.

Great video. I love your farm! If the tops of the roosting boxes are spiky, the chickens will not roost on top of them and make them poopy. Look for pigeon or chicken spikes. You can get them in metal or plastic.

Dude, thank you so much for this breakdown of the challenges of BSF larva at scale. I have been very interested in the possibilities of using them for soil remediation and protein conversion via livestock feed. It sounds like turnkey automation needs to be developed better before it can be a practical solution. Have you tried using the casings from the bsf mixed with the chicken droppings to improve your crop production rates or is your soil already at peak yield? Perhaps BSF is more practical on less fertile land where the nutrients from the BSF waste can improve soil quality as a secondary product.

Try getting into aquaponics systems where you can raise crops and fish at the same time so that you can raise minnows for your chickens to eat. Now if you design the system well it can be mostly automated and in the process you will be growing food that you can eat and sell, and raise fish of your choice. Anyway it's just something that might help cut down the cost of feeding the chickens, your family, and possibly bring in an extra source of income.

If you live near a creek set a minnow trap. Fresh minnows are very good for chickens and they love them. They will go nuts as those minnows flop around. BSF is actually a better source of calcium than protein. And they should also be less than 5% of your chickens diet. Literally less than 1/2 of an ounce when their daily consumption of approximately 4 to 6 ounces.

So I agree with a lot of what you said in this video as far as black soldier flies not being sustainable for large scale chicken keeping. I don't agree with the types of food you have to feed them however. When I kept soldier flies I had no issues with them growing up just fine on plant waste as long as you don't feed them things like tomato stocks or potato vines which are toxic. I didn't notice any difference when I was using compost to when I used a bag of commercial layer pellets or a bag of chick starter granules. They had gotten wet so they went to the flys for science. Also my compost was not purely plant waste it was things like the fallen rotten apples from under my neighbor's apple tree, shredded paper, rabbit waste and bedding and table scraps. Also I found giving mine a ramp to crawl out when they were ready to go pupate was extremely helpful I didn't have to mess with them other than adding more compost to their bin. They just sorted themselves into a bucket for me it was rather convenient and I probably wouldn't have done it otherwise. Know where I live it's a very seasonal food source so from late spring to mid autumn. But that wasn't their main source of protein. I used it to supplement their primary protein sources in the summer to cut down on how much I spent on feeding the 60 or so chickens I had which did help. I actually moved from that property a few years ago I gave the black soldier fly set up and a few very friendly hens to my old neighbor who was getting into raising tilapia. I bumped into him this Summer at a farmers market he was selling tilapia filleted on sight, homegrown veggies and eggs. the guy started using the chicken bedding and that same neighbors apple trees to grow the soldier fly larvae. he would use the maggots to feed the tilapia and he would use the Wastewater from the tilapia and compost from the maggots to fertilize his garden beds.

Idk if Madre de agua available in your area but I feel like Lantana, Vanderblomst, Yellow Sage, Red Sage and Shrub Verena might be. Those are flowers that chicken eat as well and full of nutrients.

blend( electric blender machine ) some watermelon and cucumber together and then mix in some dried green algae powder till it becomes like a dough. they love it. And last a while in the freezer. But! for as many chickens as you have.. its just a treat for your favourite few :)

Brother, this is an awesome channel. I love being able to learn from someone who is actually out there doing things. Please keep this up!

You could still "use" the fly larvae to "process" organic waste if you don't want to make compost out of the waste. Feed the larvae as supplimentary food to the chickens or sell the larvae.

Yeah it is true, that the cost of maize is very expensive. Currently, I'm doing a research project on the effects of dilution of dietary energy at a constant energy-to-protein ratio on feed conversion and carcass characteristic in broiler chicken. The results of this experiment be very very interesting to see how if reduction of the amount of dietary energy will have any impact on growth performance and what will be the economic efficiency of the different dietary treatments that I'm going to use. The project with be through before August 2023

Try meal worm, made with corn or porridge Look into it I created worm bins, with leftover waste Not only did chickens get worms, but it biodegrades the kitchen waste fast, eventually you are left with amazing topsoil

amazing video, i hope you find a cheap alternative to feed. loved seeing the work and love you put into raising them

You are a great teacher. Thanks a lot for all the educational information you give us. Please try reading and working on using moringa as a chickens feed and give us your comments/recommendation.

thanks a lot for some of the most insightful content on the matter i've found so far ...following you from now on

Have you tried duckweed? It has very good protein content. It's ability to regenerate fast makes it possible to be used in a big farm like yours. It's mostly used in aquaculture as a supplement feed for Tilapia fish. Duckweed is also useful for water filtration. You simply put chicken manure in a water tank or pond and most often duckweed will do very well with good sunlight.

Have you tried madre de agua? It's starting to be a popular feed here in Southeast Asia as poultry, cattle and fish feed. You don't need a lot of water or dig any pond. You can even grow it as fence or boundary tree. Edit: you can even process it with soya cake into animal feed pellets for long term storage. It may help mitigate the high cost of feed as a cheap filler that is also high in protein and beneficial for animal health.

I still think you can do it. Just look at the set up of companies that are manufacturing BSFL commercially and get some ideas from them.

chickens are omnivores. i give mine off-cuts of pork and beef meat, anything the butcher cant sell, boiled and minced. i give them maggots but dried and they have access to grassland for foraging. edit: sorting the maggots with a crib would take 20 minutes.

God bless you, you do a great job raising your chickens.

You can use PVC pipe to do 45 degree angles, hook to a 55-gallon drum outside the place. 😅

Dirt to soil by Gabe Brown is good read. Mixed cover crops great way to get organic matter increase in soil so it holds more water for cash crops

Thank you Dr for the video

In Hungary my grandparents (not this large scale as you, only 20 chikenand 10 duck) used to feed with mix of corn, wheat, oats and sunflower seed. When chicks born we supplement thier food with flies. I go around the house with a fly swatter and hunt the flies. And the chicks followed me 😂😂. It was funny when i had the swatter in my hand, the chikens also come to me for a fly. Nice video!

Have you considered feeding them dry mealworms? It's very cheap in bulk, and contains around 50% protein by weight... They are also very easy to raise in large quantities, but then you also need grain and vegetable scraps to feed them... You can also add in reject eggs, cooked. Cooked eggs are about 90% protein by weight.

I think hiring 8-10 people a month to process all the waste is cheaper than buying soya. He fed the maggot with cow dung which is impractical. He should just asks for rotten veggies and fruit from merchant in markets. It worked really well here in Indonesia. Though it's true since it's labor intensive, most farmer that fed their chicken with bsf maggot always ended up making a factory for the bsf maggot itself. It uses a lot of space and workers.

Good day Dr. Daniel, please is it possible to share your recipe for the DIY chicken feed??

For the top of the common egg laying area, you can use anti-bird roosting spikes, which are basically just 3 inch to 6 inch tall pieces of skinny metal (like a railroad spike or long nail) to reduce the amount of space available to roost and it should be too uncomfortable for the chickens to roost there, which means no more chicken poop on top of the egg laying area. Something similar is done with plastic for mounting arms for security cameras and outdoor WIFI mounts. The two key things are that the anti-bird roosting spike must be too skinny/pointy for a bird to roost on top and they must be space closed enough together to prevent a bird from roosting between them.

I use the same amount of food as you do for not only chickens ducks and turkeys. Feeding soldier fly is only a treat i give them once a week. Any more it is not worth it. Right now we are 60% maze due to below zero temps. You are a very smart chicken raiser.

Thanks so much,u doing a great job, but do we feed them,is it by mixing it with d feed or just like that, and also can we mix cassava peal with to feed to feed d chicken or is it good to feed d chicken with cassava peal only

I stopped feeding my son maggots a few weeks ago and he is feeling better than ever!

Thanx for video, I am glad to know the truth of the Fly trap, you and the birds are happy, GL and be blessed

This is my new favorite KZfaq Channel!!!

awesome video. i was interestedin the BSF cultivation but thank god I watched your video.i also have other ideas I wanted to explore in feed formulation using dried cassava leaves(21%-30% protein) shredded in addition to corn and limestone for 200 Brahm birds. what do you think about this?

Great job! Love the video and info. Keep up the great job and thanks a bunch.

Thank you. Lots of really good information.

Thanks for the truthful video about your own experience.

Ofcourse if you want to catch up with demand and supply you have to scale up your BSF production in all stages to keep up with your chicken feeds atleast a 50 percent less in your feeds cost by BSF supplementation will help.

Respect from California..

It makes me so happy to see "real" chickens, and not the poor ones bred here in the United States, that are so overweight they just lay around all day, and die of heart attacks a lot.

I known someone he has many restaurant then the waste from his restaurants was the food source for his BSF Farm. He also have a house & automatic springler for the moist. Then everyday he can get 35KG on larvae. So true in large scale it will took proper planning for it to be sustainable. 👍👍👍👍👍👍

Supplement feed with hemp seed. You get to grow the hemp for medicine and everything else but also get seed for more hemp and more chickens

Hey everyone, thx Doc for sharing 😍

After the breweries have finished with the barley you can buy the left overs from them. Thats a good feed !! We give it to cattle in the uk.

ED Either crab-grass, blue-grass, or bermuda-grass, left to grow as it could; there was a plastic-wrapped-soil-sack while the grass weathered a whole year over-growth, and the grass deposited surprising wealth of seed: even if they're unwelcome plants, they might secretly make food nobody knows about but a small few unhappy trivia buffs. The worst plants are easily toasted seeds.

Doc can you please teach us how to formulate chicken feeds; both layers and broilers.

It may not work for your area, but we had amazing success with stinging nettle forage. It is perrenial grower, likes cool weather, and is 41% protien by dry weight. You have to harvest and dry it completely before feeding to neutralize the stinging hairs though.

I didnt even search for this channel, but I like your energy brah. Got my sub

First time watching, you do a great job editing your videos, and explaining everything. See ya in the next video, BOL.

There's is another option for feed : Use the poultry as post harvest tillage. You calculate a poultry/m² ratio. Then let them out in the targeted parcel with a gate and security so they don't go where they're not needed and safe from predators. Let them pasture, daytime only, usually 1/2 days is optimal. They'll eat the harvest leftovers, unwanted seeds, pests, bugs and so on. Their claws provide for light tillage which build soil, in addition to their 💩. Fresh air, is good for them, minimizes stress which provide healthier eggs and meat. You save on pesticides and fertilizers to an extent, you get tillage that build soil instead of destroying.

Hi Daniel, I have a doubt, can you suppliement rabbit meat as BSF feed since rabbits are in abundence and can reproduce faster. Also we can mitigate laurve harvesting issue by only using deboned meat from rabbits. Big fan of your work👍

Thank you for the realistic feedback - I always think to get an objective picture, ask the people, who have to do the job. Everyone else is just doing self(ish) promotion. Maybe there is potential here, but as you said only at scale.

Their hits me deeply in my heart, it reminds me of my late chickens 😭😭but no matter what ✍️am passionate I have to make it Insha'Allah

Thank you for your video. You have so much knowledge. What was the green stuff in the water? We have a lot of water at the moment

I dread buying chicken from other farmers due to the thought that they may have been fed on maggots. I rear my own.

I found your channel today. I watched your vlog and I am impressed by your presentation and your practical knowledge. Now I just subscribed and looking forward for more of your videos

How was the results after feeding them to the chicken in the short span of time you were doing BSF

What beautiful fertile land you have. Good luck with the chooks!

Great video Doc!!

Black-soil and Midnight-soil are just human shit in dirt; whereas actually amended-soil of human-shit sits sealed over a season between each of three open turns of an otherwise air-sealed barrel, over one year, it makes completely-decomposed over-saturated soil-amendments capable of growing robust produce for family or farm.

Evening Doctor Daniel I am Rashel from Cameroon. I have been following you on KZfaq and am very happy with the teachings. What caught my attention is that you said you mix limestone in feed. Can I know why and what is the dimension of the 2000 births poultry you have. I am building my own poultry and it is 24 x9m how many births can this contain

I have no idea how I ended up on this video, but ended up watching all the way through anyway.. Very charismatic guy

Thanks for speaking out the truth. Bravo

Yes, in practical case. Its difficult and unpractical in big scale. My friend told me to use magots, but same problem at practical

I put lots of piles of sticks and grass and lots of slaters and other wood insects grow up in the piles of sticks and grass. We in New Zealand like to have a few chickens at home.

NICE OKRA ! Also your banana plants look big and magical. Is that the burgundy/red-colored Okra? I grew it for the first time last year, in California. Be well

Black soldier fly larvae as animal feed may pose a risk of parasite transmission.

I love hearing this man speak 💯

how much land do you own? look into growing different varieties of sunflowers, sorghum, amaranth, add in a good calcium source of oyster shells with the seeds, and BSF larvae, and your feed should have plenty of minerals, and protein for keeping the health of the chickens. Put out barley fodder, you can grow in trays on a four- or five-tiered shelf wire rack that can each shelf hold 3 plastic trays of soaked barley grain that will give you 20 lbs. of fodder for your chickens every 7-9 days the trays will grow to about 6-8" in height and sprout all the barley grain at the bottom of the fodder. What few grains that don't sprout the chickens eat as well. No waste. Seek out sources of fruits, like melons, strawberries, blueberries, the chickens will peck of the Rhines and the remaining's can be used to put into compost pile for your garden for adding rich, nutrient compost for next year's planting.

Dr. Where can we get the soya cake? Suppose I have my own soya what are the measurements I know we are supposed to road it first. Thanks.

Thanks very much for the work done but I wish to visit your farm for more information.

Hey your title is misleading, I am in Eldoret Kenya, I produce 150kgs every day, I think you have enough organic waste from the chicken droppings, which you can give the bsf larvae, maybe because it's Labor intensive and your focus is chicken and not BSF, since bsf requires more attention .

Giving antibiotics to layers in production. The eggs from medicated birds should not be eaten or sold until at least 10 days after treatment. Are you still selling your eggs? Or is the rule different in Africa.

Great video. On the communal laying boxes just add a skinny beam and put a steeper angle roof top on the laying house. A thin sheet of steel works well.

Hi Dr Daniel , What type of premix do you use or recommend? There reason i am asking is because we have a lot of counter faint products and i wouldn't want to be a victim.