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Animal Production Science Animal Production Science Society
Food, fibre and pharmaceuticals from animals
RESEARCH ARTICLE

Analysing the effects of feeding black soldier fly on broiler growth performance: a meta-analysis

Zafar Hayat https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0975-1594 A , Tuba Riaz https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8559-6346 A * , Youssef A. Attia B , Faran Hameed C and Fahad Javaid Siddiqui C
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations

A Department of Animal Sciences, College of Agriculture, University of Sargodha, Sargodha 40100, Pakistan.

B Department of Arid Land Agriculture, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah 21589, Saudi Arabia.

C VerdantWays, 90 Royal Birkdale Court NW, Calgary, AB T3G 5R5, Canada.

* Correspondence to: tuba.riaz@uvas.edu.pk

Handling Editor: Reza Barekatain

Animal Production Science 64, AN24106 https://doi.org/10.1071/AN24106
Submitted: 13 April 2024  Accepted: 17 September 2024  Published: 8 October 2024

© 2024 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing

Abstract

Context

The black soldier fly has been found to be a rich protein source, containing high amounts of protein and lipids, making them a valuable and sustainable alternative to conventional protein sources, such as fish and soybean meals, for broilers, which has also been demonstrated by multiple studies.

Aims

A meta-analysis was conducted using peer-reviewed published research on the use of black soldier flies in poultry diets to test the hypothesis that it enhances growth performance as a sustainable alternative to plant-based protein sources.

Methods

To this end, we used publicly available databases (Google Scholar, PubMed, Science Direct, Embase) to identify peer-reviewed papers. Retrieved articles were screened for relevance and quality using established criteria. The studies were largely rejected due to non-reporting of variance measures or reporting pooled measures of variance that could not be used. As a result, eight studies were used to extract data for growth performance, including body weight gain.

Key results

The meta-analysis showed that the effect of feeding black soldier fly meals on body weight gain was non-significant. However, the subgroup analysis showed that utilisation of the frozen form of the black soldier fly lowers body weight gain compared with the birds fed basal diets. Furthermore, the feed intake was significantly (P < 0.05) reduced when the broilers were fed with diets containing black soldier fly meals. The feed conversion ratio showed non-significant (P > 0.05) differences with the supplementation.

Conclusions

The inclusion level of black soldier fly larvae meal in any form was seen to be safe up to 10%, and the effective duration of the supplementation was ≤35 days.

Implications

The utilisation of black soldier fly as a sustainable protein source should be encouraged to facilitate farmers in terms of being less dependent on soybean meal, as well as to reduce the competition between humans and animals for plant protein sources.

Keywords: black soldier fly, broilers, insects, meta-analysis, protein, random effects methods, soybean replacement, weight gain.

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