What does Manna Insect actually do? Part 3

Manna MIND climatization technology

Here’s the 3rd article shining light into what we actually do at Manna Insect other than just offer free content, tools and webinars. The 1st article can be found HERE and the 2nd one HERE.

If you’ve read the previous articles, you already know that on top of the “several per day” insightful insect industry posts, the free BSF business case calculator, the FARM Hub with its Farming App and Knowledge base features and the free webinar series, we sell training and mentoring services as well, but did you know we sell technical solutions also?

The crown jewel of our “tech-stack” is the unique Manna MIND climatization technology.

Manna MIND is a sensor and control unit that enables creating an artificial environment within an insect production unit, optimizing it for BSF’s needs, automatically adjusting to all changes.

Manna MIND is produced by ourselves, coded and built totally in-house at Manna Insect, and is based on our own need and innovation from the time we farmed black soldier fly ourselves – we don’t farm BSF ourselves anymore, we focus on the technology and digital services to support BSF farmers.

We’ve done BSF farming from A-Z, all the way from breeding BSF and collecting eggs to managing the hatching, smashing potatoes and other food and biowaste ingredients into various mixes that were fed to the larvae, testing different recipes and trying to figure out how to make the larvae grow bigger, faster, convert more biowaste efficiently, and eventually separating the larvae and frass and post-processing those for later use. We even farmed chicken in our office, using them as a test audience for the larvae!

During that time, we realized that we needed to manage the temperature, humidity, ventilation, CO2 levels, and so much more inside the production unit to make the process as efficient as possible, and to make it predictable, so that each batch we produced was resulting to the same amount, size and quality of larvae and frass.

The most crucial aspect was controlling the climate in real-time during the growth stage, where temperature, humidity, and other factors fluctuated throughout the entire time, and managing conditions in the breeding cages and facility was almost equally important.

Luckily, we had a couple of PhDs in the team who were able to use their knowledge in biology and in the technical fields to create and even program a system that was able to operate various equipment within the production unit to measure, manage and automatically adjust the growth conditions, making it a huge success.

Once the right substrate recipe for a particular biomaterial was found, we could trust the system to always optimize the environment and to create an artificial climate in the production unit to reach the production levels no one can achieve outdoors or in any other open environment, and in most cases not even indoors without a climatization setup.

The system was named Manna MIND, as it operates like brains in managing all relevant equipment automatically based on real-time sensor data within the production unit or facility, saving significant amount of time and effort and manual labour especially in small- and medium-sized operations.

In other words, Manna MIND is a customizable climate control system, which automatically adjusts conditions to optimize insect production during different growth cycle stages. With sophisticated software it works its magic behind the scenes, fine-tuning the conditions in selected black soldier fly growth cycles (breeding, nursing, rearing). It establishes and maintains an ideal environment for stress-free larvae growth or flies to mate by dynamically adjusting multiple parameters in real-time through a set of complex algorithms.

Though the FARM hub, customer can monitor and adjust the environment also manually from a user friendly interface – a dashboard of sort – and set different growth programs or set and receive notifications and alerts from the production modules in case something unexpected happens, such as power outage, someone entering the premises without permission, equipment breaks and so much more.

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The price of Manna MIND?

A Manna MIND climatization device, including
• How to build and use climatized BSF farming units PREMIUM course and other training materials
• Digital guidance for sourcing and building the production unit (e.g. BOM)
• Manna MIND device and Farming App PRO license for 12 months
• Farming App, a tool for managing all daily farming operations, workforce, tasks, etc. guided by AI
• Remote one-on-one technical mentoring for farming unit build-up

Starting kit: 7 500 EUR.

Discounts are applied when customer buys more units or licenses at once. For example, new MIND units without additional services can be 5 900 euros per unit or even less when buying several at once.

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For more information about Manna MIND and its features, check out Press Release of Manna MIND Gen2 and register to use the FARM Hub, where you can find explanatory videos on all things related to BSF farming and the use of climatization technology.

Written by Tom Laine, Head of Marketing

Read also:
What does Manna Insect actually do? Part 1
What does Manna Insect actually do? Part 2