Potential use of mealworm frass as a fertilizer: Impact on crop growth and soil properties

Abstract

Rearing insects is expected to dramatically increase during the next few years, and this will be associated with generating high quantities of frass (insect excreta). It is necessary to find solutions allowing the efficient valorization of these by-products before a major upscaling of the industry takes place. therefore, this study aims at investigating the fertilizer potential of frass. A pot experiment was established and soil was amended either with mealworm (Tenebrio molitor L.) frass (10 Mg ha −1 ), with mineral fertilizer (NPK) at equivalent nutrient level to frass or with a mixture of 50% NPK and 50% frass. Changes of soil properties and growth and nutrient uptake by barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) were then analyzed. Due to its rapid mineralization and the presence of nutrient in a readily-available form, we found that frass is as efficient as mineral NPK fertilizer to improve biomass and N, P and K uptake by barley. Compared to mineral fertilizer, water soluble P concentration is five times lower in the presence of frass, which prevents p from loss and sorption onto soil constituents. More importantly, BioLoG ecoplate reveals that addition of frass stimulates soil microbial activity, especially when it is mixed with mineral fertilizer, suggesting a synergistic effect between both amendments. Taken together, our results indicate that frass has a great potential to be used as a partial or a complete substitute for mineral npK fertilizer. this is especially relevant in the context of a reduced availability of mineral fertilizers while being consistent with circular economy's principles.

Exploring Black Soldier Fly Frass as Novel Fertilizer for Improved Growth, Yield, and Nitrogen Use Efficiency of Maize Under Field Conditions

“…rapa. Additional benefits of insect frass fertilizer on soil health for improved drought and salt tolerance, disease suppression, higher crop growth and yield have also been documented by Choi and Hassanzadeh (2019) and Houben et al (2020).…”

“…Most research efforts on use of insect frass as a fertilizer have been conducted under controlled conditions (Kagata and Ohgushi, 2012;Poveda et al, 2019;Houben et al, 2020). Those that have involved BSF frass (Choi and Hassanzadeh, 2019) have been performed under potted conditions, without assessing the economic yield and nutrient utilization.…”

Method for Zero-Waste Circular Economy using worms for plastic agriculture: Augmenting polystyrene consumption and plant growth

“…The lack of support of mealworm frass on dragon fruit cacti growth is unexpected given a previous report 14 . This difference may be due to the usage of 100% frass for our evaluation or due to the different nutritional requirement of the dragon fruit cacti, or the difference in frass from mealworms that are fed purely on PS.…”

“…In our frass analysis, we did not test the mealworm frass as they did not support our cacti growth, and the literature on plastic degrading mealworms was already quite extensive 14,23 . From our focus on superworm frass, we did not detect notable additional toxic degradation products in the filtered frass of superworms fed on PS as compared to those fed on bran.…”

“…The worms are also rich in chitin 11,12 , a chemical shown to improve the growth and the yields of plants [13][14][15] . More recently, superworms are also been reported to consume PS, and at a higher rate than mealworms 16 , showing promise in the use of superworms in the fight against plastics.…”