Most people might be squeamish about being surrounded by bugs all day, but insect farmer and company co-founder Chua Kai-Ning, 24, is unfazed.

“With insect farming, it’s a very new concept. We want to break ceilings and invent the wheel,” she said.

A short bus ride away from the bustling Orchard Road shopping district, Insectta lies within a leafy enclave in the quiet Queenstown neighbourhood, where young farmers stride about in high-cut boots.

The atmosphere is a mixture of “hipster meets kampong [village],” according to Chua, an English Linguistics graduate.

The idea of farming black soldier flies – which are native to Singapore’s forests – first came to Chua and her co-founders when they were looking for a sustainable way to combat Singapore’s food waste crisis.

Food waste makes up about 10 per cent of all refuse in Singapore, but only 17 per cent of this food waste is recycled – the rest is incinerated, with all the negative environmental effects that can cause.

Black soldier fly larvae, however, can help by munching through a carefully calibrated mix of leftovers from local soy bean manufacturers and craft breweries. They eat up to four times their own body weight each day and mature into adult flies within two weeks, making them relatively easy to farm.

Once the food waste has been broken down into an organic soil-like matter called frass – made up of larvae excrement – the Insectta team turns it into fertiliser to be sold to consumers. Each month, they convert about 6.5 tonnes of food into 2,700 litres of organic fertiliser.

Local pets and fish farms also benefit, with about 300kg of the protein-rich larvae being supplied to them every month to be used as feed.

Chua pops over to her neighbours’ yard now and again to feed some of the larvae to their plump chickens, which have affectionately been named Popeye, Popcorn and Lor Mai Gai.

Black soldier flies do not bite, sting or transmit diseases, according to Chua, who describes them as having a “chill” personality and being “good friends which don’t seek to harm”.

Because their cultivation is so new to Singapore, the team at Insectta had to work with the authorities to draw up a regulatory framework and it took a lot of trial and error to find the optimum conditions for keeping the larvae “happy”.

Even small changes to their environment can prove disastrous, with the larvae susceptible to dying from heat, drowning if their diet contains too much liquid and attempting to escape en masse.

Not only do the workers at Insectta have to stay alert to these challenges, but there is also the laborious process of manually feeding the larvae, as well as sorting, harvesting and lugging around heavy loads. “You will be armpit deep in sweat and dirt,” Chua said.

As she takes her responsibility for the larvae very seriously, Chua spends seven days a week at the company’s 200 square metre farm. Fittingly, plastered on the wall is a small motivational poster featuring a picture of the larvae with the slogan: “Teamwork: a single soldier doesn’t make an army.”

In sanitised Singapore – where spitting, littering or forgetting to flush a public toilet can land you with a fine – insect farming is still very much an alien concept.

Chua recalled how one group of volunteers had initially been eager, but “completely freaked out” after stepping into the farm.

“They thought it was some white lab with insects in small glass jars … They even sprayed insect repellent on themselves! Singapore is just so far removed from an environment that isn’t landscaped beautifully and they just couldn’t fathom this idea of a real insect farm,” said Chua.

Since its inception in March 2018, Insectta has nearly tripled in size, helped along by the arrival of enthusiastic staff such as Alwin Fong, 29, who left the finance world to become Insectta’s operations manager.

“It’s exciting to see things growing under your care,” said Fong, as he compared the two jobs. “Back then, on the trading floor, I was moving huge sums of money around the world but they were just numbers … things became very distant and cold.”

To showcase the farm’s work to Singaporeans, Insectta housed a bin of larvae in the Plaza Singapura mall during a sustainability festival in June, where shoppers could dispose their food scraps and watch them disappear before their eyes. Heartened by the response, the team plans more outreach programmes with local schools and firms.

Chua said that with the right legislation, funding and dialogue, far more could be achieved. It’s hoped that as the work of biotech start-ups like Insectta becomes more well known, they will find it easier to compete for funding with more typical tech start-ups.

The farm is currently operating at one-third capacity and the team hopes to eventually harvest leftover waste from Singapore’s myriad food stalls and restaurants, if regulations permit.

While the work can be back-breaking and unglamorous, being an insect farmer has given Chua a new-found appreciation for watching things decompose.

She said, “A good gardener knows how to turn s*** into compost. Turning a negative value product can be hard, smelly, dirty work … But it also connects you to the cycle of life. Things have to rot and decay before they can be turned into life-giving resources.” ■