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I published an English operating manual for Black Soldier Fly production. The line on the sales page is the brief I wrote to myself: from a working BSF plant, not a textbook.
This post is the dedicated announcement. It is not another starter tutorial, not another modular-farm regulation survey, and not a recap of the 2024–2025 failures. Those pieces already exist on this blog. This one is narrower: what is in Profitable Black Soldier Fly Farming, who it is for, and the operator thesis behind it.
Why a manual, and why now
Raúl Reyes and I started Insectius with €7,000 and a 160 m² unit. By late 2025 we had raised €3.5 million for a decentralized pilot. The distance between those two numbers is not a growth story. It is a list of things we had to learn the expensive way: substrate that looked cheap until ash, moisture and logistics were counted; licenses that take longer than the build; harvest and processing that decide whether you have a product or a biology experiment; and buyers who compare insect meal to fishmeal, not to a slide about circularity.
I wrote the book because that list was scattered across notebooks, plant logs, and conversations with other operators. The sector already has papers, market reports, and pitch decks. It has fewer documents that treat a plant as a plant: trays, climate, pests, KPIs, offtake, and the cost per tonne that decides whether you stay open.
The thesis the book is built around
The argument is not that BSF cannot work at scale. It is that scale without unit economics is how plants die.
Smaller plants sited next to waste beat large plants that truck feedstock across a region. Local residue is heavy, wet, and variable. Transport turns a free input into an expensive one. A network of smaller units can match local supply, keep capital in pieces you can actually run, and fail in smaller increments. A single megaplant has to be right on feedstock, process, permits, and offtake at the same time.
Unit economics come first. Insect meal has to move toward fishmeal parity, not toward a premium that aquafeed and livestock buyers will not pay at volume. We already sell meal below €2,000 per tonne and treat that as a waypoint, not a victory lap. If the model only works as a specialty SKU, it is not a feed-ingredient business.
If that framing is already how you look at a plant, the book is written for you. If you want a literature review or a fundraising narrative, it will feel too operational.
What is in the manual
The book is English only. It has 22 chapters and 4 appendices.
The early chapters cover biology, history, markets, products, and the regulatory map you need before you sign a lease. The middle is the plant: waste and substrate, facility design, breeding, larvae rearing, harvest and processing. The later chapters are what most “how to start” posts skip: the metrics that tell you the batch is drifting, biosecurity, pests, scaling, and how a BSF unit sits next to other agricultural systems. The appendices are reference: glossary, calculations, and resources you will actually open again.
It is not an academic text. Peer-reviewed work is used where it helps an operator decide something. The test for a chapter was whether it would have saved us time or money in the 160 m² unit, or later when we had to justify a decentralized pilot instead of a single large box.
Who it is for
The useful reader is already in the sector, or close enough that you do not need a “what is BSF?” section: operators, founders sizing a first plant, farmers adding a waste-to-feed line, and people reviewing a facility who want the operational questions rather than the market-size paragraph.
It is less useful if you want a species monograph, a complete legal opinion for your jurisdiction, or proof that insect protein has already won. The book is a plant manual with a thesis, written from a plant.
How to get it
The digital book is €59 (PDF and EPUB, lifetime updates). Advanced is €199 and adds a 1-hour call, a 2-hour video course, templates, and priority email.
The sales page is here: https://bsfbook.com/.
If you are deciding whether to build, lease, or walk away, read the economics and the plant chapters before you spend on steel. The expensive mistake in this sector is still the same one: treating scale as the strategy, and unit cost as a problem to solve later.
