Rotten Vegetable Leaves Turned Into Food For Insects In China

Workers sort mealworms at a feedlot breeding insects in Lijiazhuang Village, Yuzhong County of northwest China’s Gansu Province, Dec. 4, 2012.

A worker tries dried mealworms at a feedlot breeding insects in Lijiazhuang Village, Yuzhong County of northwest China’s Gansu Province, Dec. 4, 2012.

The feedlot was set up in Lijiazhuang in the hope of consuming rotten vegetable leaves leaving in the field in Yuzhong County. It has been found that a tonne of mealworms need seven or eight tonnes vegetable for food per day.

At present, those insects in the feedlot could eat up 20 tonnes of rotten vegetable leaves, which, in a certain sense, solve the problem of large amount of waste vegetable leaves rotting in fields in the county.

The county is one of the vegetable planting bases in the province, which produce over a billion kilograms of vegetable every year for domestic market. As the planting industry grows rapidly in Yuzhong, the increasing rotten leaves on farmlands become a threat to local environment.

Authorities both in Yuzhong and the province have tried many ways to tackle the headache, including breeding insects, by which those waste leaves could be turned into high protein diet products. <Xinhua/Nie Jianjiang>