Tebrio, a biotech company from Salamanca, is allegedly working to open it in this state.to the biggest farm vermin the world in 2024plants where insects will produce 100,000 tons of p per yearFor animal feed, pet food, agricultural and bioindustrial applications in cosmetics or textiles.
About 15 minutes by road from the capital, everything is ready for construction. The new 90,000 square meter Tebrio factory, A company founded in 2017 with a name based on the beetle they produced: tenebrio molitor, often referred to as the flour worm.
“We will produce something over 100,000 tons”Tebrio’s founding partner, Sabas de Diego, explained the situation to Efe during his visit to the existing factory with Adriana Casillas.
The company, which has its own technology patented in 150 countries, will create around 250 jobs when the new project in Salamanca is finished, but its target It expands into the Americas and Asia.
“Despite being the largest factory in the world, we must do much more to face the medium term problem: there won’t be enough animal protein to feed the animals we raise,” De Diego said.
a leading company
Fran García, the company’s director of communications, said the idea that De Diego and Casillas had in 2014 was to provide a solution to the fact that “animal consumption and human food consumption are competing.”
So they looked for a “bioconverter tool”, which is the insect, produce protein and fat to feed cattleHe pointed to something that “globally millions of hectares could be liberated, reclaimed for human consumption or creating biodiversity”.
The company, which opened the first approved insect production facility of the European Union for animal feed in 2015, became the first biotechnology company in the world to be authorized to produce organic fertilizers obtained from insects in 2019.
Less use of chemical fertilizers
Casillas explained that the idea for these entrepreneurs from Salamanca was to optimize resources “to get much more food through a new supply source, even though the insects have been here all their lives and are sustainable.”
“Manure produced by Tenebrio’s excrement has extraordinary capacities for use. Using much less chemical fertilizers and improving soil quality both in organic agriculture and in cooperation with conventional agriculture“, added.
In the new factory, the first phase of which will be completed in 2024 and the last phase in 2025, The insect will be grown vertically, so it requires “little space compared to other farms”Garcia stated.
“We also need very little waterwe are a circular company, we take advantage of every element that this insect has,” he added.
Construction of these insect breeding and processing facilities will begin immediately on 90,000 square meters of the 130,000 square meters industrial land that Salamanca is developing in the Peña Alta sector.
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