Zimbabwe farmers turn to maggot-breeding to survive the drought

At first, the suggestion to try farming maggots spooked Mari Choumumba and other farmers in Nyangambe, a region in southeastern Zimbabwe where drought wiped out the staple crop of corn.

After multiple cholera outbreaks in the southern African nation due to extreme weather and poor sanitation, flies were largely seen as something to exterminate, not breed.

Experts from the government and the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, broached the idea. But many stepped back when told it was about being trained to farm maggots for animal feed and garden manure.

“When this concept was introduced to us we were just coming out of the Covide19 pandemic and people were excited thinking that donors had brought food aid,” says Choumumba.

“But after realising that this was about black soldier flies and maggots most people then began to shun the idea because the misconception was that all flies cause cholera."

Fast forward 12 months, and the 54-year-old walks with a smile to a smelly cement pit covered by wire mesh where she feeds rotting waste to maggots — her new meal ticket.

After harvesting the insects about once a month, Choumumba turns them into protein-rich feed for her free-range chickens that she eats and sells.

And maggot farming is good for the environment too.

“Nowadays, nothing goes to waste or is thrown away, whether it’s corn leaves, banana skins or orange peels," she says.

"Instead of throwing that away and littering the environment, we tell our fellow villagers to bring that to us, we have good use for it, it is food for our maggots,” she adds.

From bare survival, it is becoming a profitable venture.

After harvesting the insects, Choumumba mixes them with drought-tolerant crops such as millets, cowpeas, and sunflower and a bit of salt.

With 15 kilogrammes of maggots harvested every 21 days, she can produce about 375 kilogrammes of chicken feed.

Choumambo sells eggs and free-range chickens to restaurants, and some of the feed to fellow villagers at a fraction of the cost charged by stores for traditional animal feed.

Before rural farmers took up maggot farming, 80 per cent of chicken production costs were gobbled up by feed. But the United States Agency for International Development says this has now dropped by about 40 per cent.

 The maggots are offspring of the black soldier fly, which has a life cycle of just weeks, during which it lays between 500 and 900 eggs.

The larvae devour decaying organic items, from rotting fruit and vegetables to kitchen scraps and animal manure, and turn them into a rich protein source for livestock.

"This is an enabler because the black soldier fly maggots, or the meal, in terms of protein composition alone, is between 55 to 60 per cent crude protein,” says Robert Musundire.

He is a professor specialising in agricultural science and entomology at Chinhoyi University of Technology in Zimbabwe, which breeds the insects and helps farmers with breeding skills.

Donors and governments have pushed for more black soldier fly maggot farming in Africa because of its low labour and production costs and huge benefits to agriculture, the continent’s mainstay that is under pressure from climate change.