Tebrio, a biotechnological company from Salamanca, is working to open in this province what it intends to be the largest insect farm in the world in 2024, facilities where 100,000 tons of products for animal feed, pet food, agriculture and bioindustrial applications will be manufactured annually with insects. cosmetic or textile.
About 15 minutes by road from the capital, everything is ready for construction to begin on the 90,000 square meters of the new Tebrio factory, a company created in 2017 with a name based on the insect they manufacture: the tenebrio molitor, commonly called meal worm.
“We are going to produce just over 100,000 tons, there are many, but we will probably end up accumulating some 3 million kilos of animals permanently in the facilities,” Sabas de Diego, co-founder of Tebrio together with Adriana Casillas, explained to Efe during a visit to the current factory.
The company, which has its own technology patented in 150 countries, will create some 250 jobs when the new project in Salamanca is finished, but its goal is to expand in America and Asia.
“Even though it is the largest factory in the world, we should do a lot more to face the problem we have in the medium term: that there will not be enough animal protein to feed the animals we raise,” De Diego indicated.
The idea that De Diego and Casillas had in 2014 wanted to provide a solution to the fact that “animal consumption and human consumption of food is entering into competition,” said the company’s communication director, Fran GarcÃa.
That is why they searched for a “bioconverter tool”, which is the insect, to produce protein and fat with which to feed cattle, something with which “millions of hectares can be released globally, which can be recovered for the human consumption again or to generate biodiversity”, he pointed out.
In 2015, the company opened the first approved insect production plant in the European Union for animal feed, and in 2019 it became the first biotech company in the world to obtain authorization to manufacture organic fertilizers made from insects.
The idea of ​​these entrepreneurs from Salamanca was to optimize resources “to obtain much more food through a new source of supply, although the insects have been here all their lives, and sustainable”, explained Casillas.
“The fertilizer that is produced with the excrement of the tenebrio has exceptional capacities for its use both in organic farming and in collaboration with the traditional one, to use much less chemical fertilizers and improve the quality of the soil,” he added.
In the new factory, whose first phase will be completed in 2024 and the final one in 2025, the insect will be reared vertically, which requires “very little space compared to other farms,” ​​GarcÃa indicated.
“We also need very little water, we are a circular company, we take advantage of each and every one of the elements that this insect has,” he added.
Construction of these insect breeding and processing facilities will begin immediately on 90,000 square meters of the 130,000 square meters of industrial land that Salamanca is developing in the Peña Alta sector.
