Frass & Soil Health

Frass is insect excrement, exoskeletons, & organic residue (soil pre/pro-biotic).

Nature's path to soil health.

What is Frass?

As a circular soil amendment, it is a promising biological alternative to synthetic fertilizers.

Application of consistent, high quality insect frass has a wide range of benefits including bolstering plant defense, replenishing beneficial bacteria and microbes, improving nutrient efficiency, increasing the bioavailability of nutrients already in soil, improving soil structure, reducing nutrient run-off, increasing water retention, and improving yields.

Frass Overview

What's Frass?

The primary byproduct of BSFL production is frass: a mixture of feces, shed exoskeletons, and substrate residue.

Beyond NPK

Frass is not only an effective fertilizer, rich in nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium (NPK), but is alive with a diverse and prolific microbial community, as substrate is modified by insect gut microbiota during digestion.

Soil Benefits

Chitin

Chitin, a compound found in frass derived from shed exoskeletons of larvae, is known to improve plant productivity and health through stimulating soil microbial activity and plant defenses.

Nutrient Availability

When applied as a soil amendment, frass has been shown to improve soil nutrient availability and microbial respiration.

Potent Alternative

Commercial trials for agricultural crops, such as lettuce, maize, and black mustard, have shown promise as a viable replacement for many commercial fertilizers.

Frass as a premium soil remediation product.

Similar to compost or animal manure, frass adds diverse, crucial organic matter, chitin, and microbes to rebuild soil structure, improve bioavailability of other soil nutrients, and promote the growth of beneficial bacteria.

Benefits of Frass

Offsets chemical fertilizer and pesticide costs/application

Increased drought resistance

Plays a key role in improved plant health, growth, and development

Potential pest reduction by stimulating natural defense mechanisms and overall biodiversity

Adds structure to treated soils

Beneficial microbes have demonstrated contribution to pathogen reduction

Contains chitin, stimulating natural plant immunities/defenses while improving soil microbial health

Low-odor

Soil Health

Healthy soil is a highly biodiverse living environment of microbes, fungi, invertebrates and more.

Soils play a critical role

in nutrient and element cycling, carbon sequestration, and physical and nutrient support of plants.

Chemical fertilizers

and pesticides application can damage soil biodiversity and microbial communities, disrupting many basic functions of a healthy soil.

Conventional agriculture

and on-farm practices like tillage and monocropping can negatively affect long-term soil health.

Fossil-fuel-based

chemical fertilizers and pesticides can account for over 20% of total GHG emissions.

Current farm practices

result in further nutrient depletion, reduction of organic matter, erosion, and harmful runoff into waterways.

Frass

is the primary byproduct of black soldier fly farming.

Chapul Farms Frass-Unleashing Nature’s Soil Building Toolkit to Accelerate the Journey Back to Productive Soil Health

Soil health & ecosystem benefits of re-integrating bugs:

Scaling the insect industry is one of the most (if not THE MOST) impactful climate actions we can take today.

Benefit areas include:

improve biodiversity (in guts and soils),
reduce organics waste (nature uses insects not landfills),
reuse biomass - insects consume would-be-waste and make 2 primary outputs: their larvae (premium protein, lipids to feed animals) and frass (a mixture of insect manure, exoskeleton, and beneficial soil microbes that restores soils destroyed by synthetic fertilizers)
improve soil health,
waste-to-value services,
improve natural plant defense (lower need for pesticides),
bio-filtration - insects don't bioaccumulate heavy metals and other toxins (we should use nature's filters),
feed the growing pet food, poultry, and aquafeed industries,
improve domestic food security (decrease reliance on imported synthetic fertilizers and more),
improve bioregional food security (hyper-localized production improvements, or, in simpler words, insects work at big and small scales, improving food security for countries or within a single farm ecosystem)
close protein gap,
improving crop nutrition (by restoring soils... it's all interconnected)
improve animal welfare (chickens fed insects...what they eat in the wild... fare better than those stuffed with corn. Shocker. they need fewer antibiotics as well),
improve natural plant defense (lower the need for pesticides),
the list goes on...

Food is part of a system, and in America we scaled up parts of our food system while leaving others behind. From both environmental and economic angles, the common sense solution is to scale critical (ie keystone species that ecosystems collapse without) environmental services up to keep pace with the other sectors that have already been scaled up (like the meat industry.)

Nature gets things right, and there's a "don't build the skyscraper on sand" analogy to be made here: all the investment $$$ into lab meat, genetically modified bacteria, or even ESG metrics won't mean *frass* unless we get our fundamentals right: organic waste can't continue. We must close the loop on agriculture. Insects are a keystone species, meaning ecosystems literally collapse without them.)

Zooming out, we can see a trend toward extraction (depleting soils without restoring them, reducing biodiversity land/sea, crop monoculture, needing more and more chemicals). We want a future that is a 180 degree course-correction toward LIFE. Restoring ecosystem's abilities to heal themselves and be adaptive/resilient by replenishing critical microbes to guts and soils with insects.

Early frass markets include:

Home and garden, citrus, tomatoes, indoor growing, cannabis.
Apply by spreading 1,000 - 1,500kg per hectare at 100% soil utilization. For gardens and new planting use 150g per square meter

Frass vs. Gas

"Synthetic Nitrogen vs. Sustainable Frass" - we can't keep fracking natural gas to make nitrogen. Most people do not understand how destructive this part of the agricultural system is to the planet.
Chapul's solution is a clear and present solution that must inevitably be implemented to maintain an affordable supply of nutrients.

Can we still afford our dependence on synthetic fertilizers?

The global food system has been dependent on synthetic fertilizers for decades, but supply disruptions, record breaking price inflation and the immense harm caused in their production and overuse has forced intense urgency in the search for viable alternatives with the potential to break this downward spiral.

Chapul Farm’s circular systems produce sustainable protein at scale using waste streams often bound for landfill. But increasingly more focus on the insect “frass” produced by our process in far higher volumes as a critical tool to wean us away from industrial fertilizers while maintaining crop yields.

NPK and much more:

Using conventional NPK analysis Chapul’s frass shows values of 2.9/1.2/2.0 but this snapshot is increasingly understood to be a narrow lens in the broader tools being adopted for gauging yield potential and soil health, particularly with a soil amendment as versatile as frass. Chapul has engaged with leading experts in soil health who have pioneered several methods that provide a fuller, data driven overview of the value contained in frass.

These approaches are designed to mimic the biological processes that occur in real world soils to deliver much greater quantities of nutrients to plant roots and, as with frass, help (re)build the microbial pathways between the soils’ nutrients and the plant roots to achieve this.

Measuring the benefits:

Using water as a solvent and other techniques, the Haney Test (from Regen Ag Labs) has been used for several decades to more closely measure the total available Nitrogen (N) and other key nutrients in soil and soil amendments. This approach is designed to reflect the ongoing mineralization of inorganic compounds in a given material from sources not captured in traditional lab testing.

We also utilize cutting edge genetic screening from BiomeMakers (Regen Ag Labs partner) who are pioneering the use of deriving actionable insights from the full genetic profile of soil and soil amendments. Their approach cross references results with an expanding soil and crop specific reference dataset that enables farmers and agronomists to map microbial contents to a wide and growing list of benefits in varied real world contexts.

Summary of our frass:

A summary of key data points from these analyses reveals the following summary of our frass:

Total available Nitrogen of 2,272 lbs per acre (for comparison corn requires ~300 lbs of N per acre)*

Phosphorous: 4,900 lbs per acre
Potassium: 6,240 lbs per acre
Organic Carbon: 9,600 lbs per acre
Soil Organic Matter (SOM): 66%
Ph 6.7

*Nutrient uptake by plants is a complex equation. These data indicate vastly more available Nitrogen than conventional lab analysis, but we advise growth trials and ongoing soil testing to enable decision support and determine optimal application method and rates.

Additional research results:

Soil water retention tests using 3% inclusion of dried frass increased moisture retention against control by 7.1%. In a 1000 acre field, this increase translates to 1.5 million gallons of water retained for every inch of rainfall.
Our frass contains hundreds of microbial species spanning a broad range of beneficial mechanisms. We are happy to provide the full dataset upon request.
Chapul has performed various growth trials in house and with third parties, that further support a strong pattern in the scientific research on frass spanning a range of target crops (i.e. corn, potatoes, bok choy, ryegrass and numerous others) demonstrating that even at low inclusion rates of both liquid frass tea and dried frass direct applied, frass frequently rivals or outperforms in growth trials against various conventional fertilizers than would be expected using traditional NPK values alone as a predictor.

Frass in perspective:

Organic soil biofertilizers and amendments, microbial biostimulants and biocontrols are multibillion dollar markets projecting massive, multi year growth prior to recent global turmoil and record price spikes in the broader fertilizer markets. These reflect long term and now accelerating shifts towards soil health and stewardship centered around no till, cover cropping and rebuilding organic matter and microbial communities in soil.
The rapid growth of insect agriculture positions frass perfectly with its diverse value spanning all aspects of these imperative changes. Our frass is a fully circular soil amendment that provides abundant organic matter, enhanced soil porosity, aggregate stability, moisture retention, abundant microbial biomass and diversity, increased mineralization, pathogen and disease resistance, in a non-toxic/non-synthetic ‘package’ mimicking nature’s most prolific soil health specialists.

More Information

SCROLL THROUGH THESE SLIDES TO ACCESS ADDITIONAL ARTICLES AND HIGHLIGHTS.

Learn More

1 / Read

2 / Listen

3 / Watch

We Can Turn Organic Waste Into High-Value Nutrients With the Power of Insects (BNN Bloomberg)
Behind the scenes at Chapul Farms: The Black Soldier Fly Revolution (SEDCOR)
Farming insects to save the world | Pat Crowley (TEDX)
Eating Insects (TEDX)
Why not eat insects? (TEDX)
Can eating insects solve global issues in an ever-changing world? (TEDX)
Season 5 Episode #21: Pitch (Shark Tank)
Follow Up (Shark Tank)
Update (Shark Tank)

FAQ

What is frass?

Frass is a general term that means the things that insects and their larvae leave behind. It contains excrement from all the things they consume as they so along like plant material, wood, human food, and other materials. Frass will look different depending on the insect type and what their food source is. Frass can look like little bits of dust, rust, or sawdust, or whatever the insects have been consuming. Frass also contains chitin, the main component found in the exoskeletons of insects and shellfish. The nutrients in frass are in a readily available form that allows it to function as efficiently as a mineral NPK fertilizer.

Written by Jason Lampman for Grow Magazine

"We have been running in-house trials on frass for the last eight months and have seen drastic improvement in finished product, which has brought us increased market value and greater customer satisfaction."

- Jason Lampman, State 3 Farms

Frass Article

Frass is a general term that means the things that insects and their larvae leave behind.

It contains excrement from all the things they consume as they so along like plant material, wood, human food, and other materials. Frass will look different depending on the insect type and what their food source is.
Frass can look like little bits of dust, rust, or sawdust, or whatever the insects have been consuming.
Frass also contains chitin, the main component found in the exoskeletons of insects and shellfish. The nutrients in frass are in a readily available form that allows it to function as efficiently as a mineral NPK fertilizer.

This page features an article from Grow Magazine.