Worms
have been shown effective in eating fusarium-damaged grain, removing
it so what remains is grain fit for higher quality grades and uses.
What’s
more, University of Saskatchewan researchers have successfully fed
the mealworms to chickens which thrive on the high protein content.
Professor
Fiona Buchananxin conducted research trials in her pursuit of
solutions to vomitoxin contamination of wheat harvests.
“We
wanted
to give value to something that the producer was losing their shirts
over,” she
said in an interview with Western Producer publication.
She
began her research with seed screenings that had vomitoxin levels of
eight parts per million and found that first the mealworms, then the
chickens, gobbled it up.
The worms
contain 50 percent protein and 34 percent fat, so it could
be an excellent product for chicks.
Buchanan
has done some rough math and determined that if Saskatchewan’s 29
million broiler chickens were fed a diet of mealworms, those worms
could consume 250,000 tonnes of fusarium-infected wheat annually.
She said
the goal would be to attract an insect-rearing facility to the
Prairies that would buy fusarium-damaged wheat from farmers and
infected screenings from seed cleaning plants.
For
Ontario, the question is whether this approach will also work for
corn.
