This morning my Thinking Man husband went out to plop disintegrating slimy greens from the fridge into the compost bin. Within seconds TM returns breathlessly shouting, "You've got to come see this! Hurry!"
Whoa! My usually flatline-emotioned TM excited about compost? Now this IS a first.
"I don't know if we should be worried, but you've got to see this," he adds breathlessly as we head to the compost bin. We've had snakes and all manner of creepy crawlers in the backyard jungle. Most of the time these turn out to be wild-kingdom moments where we all judiciously observe and actually learn something about the natural world.
Just in case there is something scary there, I cautiously peer into the bin, and wow, there's a writhing mass of brownish and tan maggots all dancing around and waving their little bodies in the hull of a large orange squash we deposited just about an hour or so earlier.
When I attended Heifer Ranch, a sustainable educational center that's part of Heifer International in Perryville, Ark., I saw plenty of maggots in amazingly large compost hills (big-ass hills) and thought I remembered their experts saying maggots are actually a good thing for composting, but just to make sure, we hop online and cruise around compost land on the Web.
Holy Goddesses of Composting, turns out these may well be the larvae of black soldier flies (Hermetia illucens), often referred to as BSF, a native fly with amazing potential for not only managing the waste of Homo sapiens -- the most wasteful species ever to evolve on the planet -- but to turn it into all manner of beneficial products and processes.
Most informative article we've found so far on BSFs is from Maria Gaura in the San Francisco Chronicle.
"BSFs eat like crazy ... vegetable peels, plate scrapings, the newspapers that lined the compost bucket - about five gallons of waste per week - all were gobbled up so fast that the compost pile began to recede. I tossed in squishy plums and wormy apples from our trees, 5 or 10 gallons at a time. They'd be gone by morning."
They also eat stuff we've been told you're not supposed to put in your compost pile ... cheese, meat scraps, oily foods, bread, etc. Gaura tells of cleaning her fridge and taking the debris to the compost pile, checking back an hour later.
" ... I peeked in and there was a party going on. The maggots were thrashing about in a feeding frenzy. Most arresting was the fate of a fist-size ball of formerly fresh mozzarella. The maggots had tunneled into the cheese, which held its shape but quivered violently. Within a half hour it was gone."
The next section of her article burrows into all the other useful things BSFs do. The usefulness of this native fly is only now being explored but it appears they may well be THE award-winning species for efficiently breaking down food waste, human and non-human poo, and turning it into stuff we can use to create closed loop systems ala William McDonough's food = waste, waste = food. More highlights from the article:
- When kept warm and protected, BSF larvae are probably nature's best composters. They can consume the manure from factory farms, food scraps from homes and restaurants - almost any type of wet and icky organic waste.
- They eat so quickly, microbes can't begin to break down the waste and produce smelly methane gas, one reason why my compost stopped stinking. In addition, the larvae secrete chemicals that kill bacteria, converting even pig poop into a safe, non-smelly soil amendment, according to one study.
- BSF are not attracted to human homes or food and do not spread disease.
- Larvae can also be useful if you have lots of pet feces - including from dogs, cats, pigs and chickens - to dispose of.
- A thriving maggot bin reduces kitchen and restaurant waste by 95 percent, according to research conducted by ESR International. That means 100 pounds of food scraps will produce 5 pounds of soil amendment and 20 pounds of well-fattened larvae, which can then be used to feed chickens or fish. The soil amendment left by BSF can be added to garden beds or fed to captive worms.
- The larvae are nutritious feed for reptiles, pigs and farmed fish, as well as domestic poultry.
- While ESR International's larvae composters may appeal to garden hobbyists in the United States, the company hopes to have a larger environmental impact with large-scale municipal waste-disposal projects in warm-weather developing countries such as Colombia and Vietnam. Using maggots to consume food waste as well as animal and even human waste could greatly decrease the production of methane, a potent greenhouse gas
- ERS sent larvae to a researcher in Iowa, and they actually made them into biodiesel," said Craig Sheppard, a retired professor of entomology and an expert on BSF. "If they divert their food waste, any fair-size city could set up a bioconversion plant" turning food scraps into renewable fuel.
A graphic photo of our maggots follows. If you're squeamish, you may want to look away.
