Regardless of marketing, the global agricultural industry may not have much of a choice in the near future. Livestock feed is a $460 billion industry, and feed comprises 60 to 70 percent of livestock and poultry production costs. Producers expect those feed sources to become more stressed in the future.

Seventy percent of all agricultural land goes toward livestock production, and 30 percent of all grains grown are fed to animals. For soybeans, that number hits 80 percent. Soy is almost always grown in large monocultures, and it requires tremendous chemical inputs. Meanwhile, aquaculture is the fastest growing agricultural sector on the planet, and that comes with its own set of astronomical challenges. For years, Richard Waite at the World Resources Institute has been investigating how to sustainably feed 10 billion people by 2050. “As we realized just how much extra fish the world is going to demand—essentially doubling—we began looking into how we can make sure it’s as sustainable as possible,” he says. “We’re not going to get much more wild fish, so that gap in increased fish demand needs to be met by aquaculture.”

In 2010, aquaculture produced 60 million tons of fish per year—requiring 20 million tons of forage fish as feed. “Looking at 2050, the challenge is going to be to get 140 million tons of farmed fish, while not increasing the amount of wild fish, which are already being fished to their limit,” Waite says. To do so, aquaculture needs to find an alternative feed source—fast. And that has made maggots more attractive than ever.

In recent months, Taylor and the industry at large have begun to clear hurdles. Last summer, the Vancouver-based bug farm Enterra received approval from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to use farmed maggots as chicken feed—the first time a federal regulatory body in North America has allowed the sale of insect ingredients as animal feed. Meanwhile, Enterra’s application for fish feed is awaiting a green light; and in the United States, one of the largest larvae companies expects to obtain federal approval for use of its products to feed salmonids (which includes trout, char, and graylings) within the year. As governments, farmers, and producers begin buying into the idea of feeding larvae to livestock, a singular question emerges: How do we make this trend global?