Crickets as future protein source for poultry and pigs.

Insect farming is considered more sustainable than traditional livestock. They are coldblooded and are efficient at converting food into protein. 

 They require 12 times less feed than cattle, four times less feed than sheep, and half as much feed as pigs and broiler chickens to produce the same amount of protein, according to a 2013 United Nations report examining insects' potential as human food. 

Insects are reported to emit fewer greenhouse gases and less ammonia than cattle or pigs, and they require significantly less land and water than cattle rearing.  

 Crickets require 8 percent of the water it takes for cows to produce a similar amount of protein,and critters emit 1 percent of the greenhouse gases of cows. The protein content the crickets deliver's is 15 percent more ,and has an iron content than spinach and as much vitamin B-12 as salmon. 

Crickets as protein source for pigs and poultry.

Crickets as edible food.

The business is fast gaining popularity because of the low capital startup, rapid and high return of investment and the relative ease of production. Iowa resident begins cricket farming for human consumption,she

Wealth creation through fingerling production.

Fingerling production in cat fish farming is an essential part of the farm operation because it is the seed needed for production.The Clarias gariepinus spp is the common cat fish reared in Nigeria because of its early maturity taste,and the fact that it has an accessory breathing organ hence can survive outside water for some hrs,this explains why its sold live in the open markets. The mature male and female brood stock are chosen and kept in separate tubs,one male can fertilize 10 females.The males are bigger and heavier than the females,weighing over 1kg is the ideal .The males must have well developed genitals that are reddish indicating maturity. The females to be used must be identified as good spawners,with a weight of 450-500g,and must be over 8months with dark golden green eggs. The females are usually injected with hormones,the eggs expressed and mixed with milt of the male catfish.The male catfish is killed to extract the milt while the female is returned to pond after eggs are expressed. There are various hormones used in stimulating ovulation in fish such as ova prim, human chorionic gonadotropin, crushed pituitary gland and a combination of motilium and suprefact. The materials needed for the spawning include; a glass trough or a bath tub with water inlet and outlet pipes, screen with stand, pumps,bowls and net covering to keep tank covered and dark.The method you intend to use will dictate materials you will put in place. The The money making potential is enormous and so many farmers are into hatchery business and smiling to the bank. Jane Waruinge, the proprietor of Jasa Fish Farm left America to set up an hatchery business. Jane only keeps a few mature fish for brooding, seeing as her venture mainly deals in fingerling,She shipped in the brooders, with her monosex tilapia coming mainly from UK, and the gold fish and catfish coming from Jambo Fish Farm in Kiambu. Her aquaculture farm now boasts of three types of fish fingerlings (tilapia, catfish and gold fish), with her specialty being in monosex male tilapia fingerlings.She pumped Sh3.5million into the development of her two plots, bought and erected the hatcheries, built the ponds and put up other numerous essential structures. The environment of the hatchery and ponds has to be kept at a constant temperature of 24-28 degrees centigrade and anything much lower or higher than that could prove disastrous to the fingerlings. More

Fighting poachers with smart apps.

A new smartphone app developed in St Petersburg in Florida, USA is being used to fight poachers in northern Kenya. Fulcrum whose use was perfected by municipalities and businesses to collect forms and field data is now being used to track down the location of elephants and ivory smugglers by sharing the information quickly with game rangers before poachers strike. The initiative, tenBoma, is a counter-poaching initiative being piloted by the non-governmental International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) and the Kenya Wildlife Service designed to protect the most endangered Kenyan wildlife by identifying, mapping, and destroying poaching networks “IFAW’s tenBoma project is taking the lessons learned from counter-terrorism and applying them to wildlife protection. Fulcrum is a powerful new weapon being used in the battle to destroy poaching. Fulcrum tracks the location of elephant poachers helping game rangers to plan their patrols. Where any security threat is detected, it is promptly shared out for effective response from ground and air surveillance. The patrols use Fulcrum-equipped smartphones, and they traverse the plains looking for poachers and plot their observations on a real-time map shared with authorities and game rangers. The information is then used to form essential data analysis which is shared out with local law enforcement and communities in the affected area The work of the Fulcrum team on the tenBoma initiative is recognized worldwide as a model for combating the effects of illegal wildlife trafficking on global security

Technology Is Making Huge Changes In The World Of Agriculture.

FORBES held its second AgTech Summit, showing off the varieties of technologies that are changing the future of farming, from big data to robots to satellites to machine learning to benevolent fungi. Julie Borlaug, the granddaughter of Nobel Peace Prize-winner Norman Borlaug, who’s carrying on the family legacy by pushing innovation in agriculture to ensure we can feed the future. Kim Nicholson, the VP of Business Development for Spensa Technologies. They manufacture the “Z-Trap,” a device that replaces the painstaking work of estimating pest populations by hand with real-time data. The Z-trap is capable of not only collecting bugs, but it zaps them with electricity in a way that allows the species of bug to be identified, making it much more efficient for farmers to control pests in their fields. more

Stem cell breakthrough restores eyesight in blind rabbits.

Scientists have been able to restore vision in blind rabbits by creating eye tissue from human stem cells, a development that could lead to human trials to help restore vision within the next two years. Researchers from the Cardiff University and Osaka University in Japan collaborated to grow multiple different cells similar to those found in the eye. Cells they created to be similar to cells in the cornea were able to surgically repair the front of the eye in the blind rabbits. The scientists behind the work say the breakthrough could lead to clinical human trials of anterior eye transplantation to restore loss of damaged vision. Andrew Quantock from Cardiff University, who coauthored the work, explained that the research published in the journal Nature shows that human stem cells are able to take on the characteristics of the cornea, lens and retina. "We've been using human iPS cells -- which are induced pluripotent stem cells -- growing them in a 2D culture dish. Spontaneously the cells, after several weeks, created four zones on their own," Quantock told WIRED. "Each zone has the molecular characteristics of a different part of the eye." "We took cells from the third zone, which most looks like the corneal epithelium, and grew those further out before transferring them onto the animal model, which was functional and worked." The scientists were able to show that the corneal cells could be cultivated and transplanted onto the eyes of "rabbits with experimentally induced blindness" to repair the front of the eye. At present 4,000 corneal grafts are performed by the NHS each year. However these rely on human organ donation, although some human patients in the UK have received stem cell treatments to save their eyesight.More

Drug delivery in blood stream using 3D printed microfish.

The "microfish" created by a team of researchers at the University of California San Diego, who claimed they can print hundreds of the tiny robots in seconds. This 3D-printed robots in the shape of small fish may one day be able to swim through bloodstreams, delivering drugs to the human body and removing toxins. The study, published in Advanced Materials, shows the robots measure just 120 microns long by 30 microns thick -- making them smaller than the width of a human hair. The microfish are made with platinum nanoparticles in their tails which, when they come into contact with hydrogen peroxide, causes their tails to move. Tiny iron oxide particles in their heads also allow the robot shoal to magnetically steer themselves. The research showed the microfish could both sense toxins and work as detoxifying robots. Their bodies glowed a fluorescent red color when placed in contaminated liquid as a result of toxic-neutralizing particles reacting to the poison.more

Nanovaccines and cancer immunity.

Yvette van Kooyk is making a cancer vaccine at the nano scale. "By using nanotechnology to deliver vaccines into the body, we can create more powerful cancer treatments," says van Kooyk, an immunologist at the VU University Medical Centerin Amsterdam. She's building nanovaccines out of glycans, sugar molecules that naturally bind to receptors on immune cells in the body. "The glycan is used for specifically targeting the cells that you need," van Kooyk explains. She exploits this trait by attaching the glycans to cancer-fighting antigens, relying on the sugar molecules to transport those antigens directly into the target immune cells, where they trigger an immune response, telling the body to attack its cancerous cells. The vaccine can target immune cells so precisely, "you don't lose your vaccine to other cells," van Kooyk says. That enables the vaccine to launch a targeted and particularly powerful immune response that may be capable of destroying tumours. Now, she is tailoring the nanovaccine to work on diseases including melanoma, pancreatic cancer and glioblastoma, a brain tumor. The goal is to give patients lifelong immunity from certain cancers so that they don't develop again, she says. In three years, she estimates, they will start trial the vaccines on humans. Read