Black soldier fly liquid biofertilizer in bunga mayang sugarcane plantation: From experiment to policy implications

Abstract

Sugarcane is one of the most important cultivated plants for more than a millennial. In Indonesia, especially in Java, sugarcane is also a part of symbolic local culture. In fact, during the Dutch colonialism sugarcane had given substantial wealth to the Dutch and in the early 1930s the export revenue of sugar from Indonesia was the second largest in the world. The status of sugarcane now is still important for Indonesia even though Indonesian status now is one of the largest sugar importing countries in the world. One of major problems for such contradicting path of history is that the continuously lowering Indonesian productivity of sugarcane since the last 45 years. The main conventional choice for sugarcane productivity improvement is, among others, maintaining high dosage of chemical fertilizer. The choice of using high dosage chemical fertilizer such as urea, for example, is not only costly in term of monetary spending but also is costly in term of environmental costs such as water, air, and soil pollutions. In fact agriculture is classified as one of the most polluted sector. This article shares the results of the case study that has been conducted one year (2017-2018) in sugarcane plantation in Bunga Mayang, Lampung Province, Indonesia. The experiment took full recommended dosage application of inorganic N, P, K, fertilizer as experimental control. The results showed that there were no significantly difference in the productivity of sugarcane between the application of full dosage of inorganic N, P, K fertilizer and the half-dosage of inorganic N, P, K fertilizer in combination with 60 l per ha of Black Soldier Fly (BSF)’s liquid biofertilizer. The results implied very important implications for future research, new agricultural practices and new development policy agenda. One of the most important policy implications is how to build a circular economic structure between rural-urban regions where now food and other agricultural products flow from rural to urban regions and create food and other organic wastes in cities. In the next system the circular structure will create no-organic waste that will pollute cities and other areas but cities will become agriculture regional source of biofertilizer produced by BSF’s biofertilizer industry which will fertilize the country sides environments.