The corner of the garage you sealed off with heavy duty plastic sheeting is hot, but it is cold outside and you are grateful. There is a cacophony of chirping all around you, and you have just put the day’s harvested crickets into the freezer for their long sleep. Your favorite tune is in your ear buds, you have a cold beverage on the work table, and you are watching brand new hatchlings emerge from their bed of peat moss to greet the world.
You are micro farming crickets.
Crickets have been farmed here in the United States commercially for over 70 years. In the 80’s and 90’s the pet reptile industry exploded in North America, and the mainstay of a reptilian diet is live crickets. The cricket farming industry suddenly became a $25 million dollar a year powerhouse, and today, there are over a dozen large cricket farms churning out millions upon millions of crickets every week.
These crickets are raised in giant boxes that are packed into massive warehouses and stacked to the ceiling. Forklifts drive pallets full of boxed crickets ready for the daily shipping and load them into trucks. Secretaries take orders over the phone. Farm workers busily go about their daily tasks, and their webpages churn out order after order after order.
That’s not micro farming crickets.
When we talk about micro farming crickets, we are talking about raising crickets in small spaces. A corner in the garage or basement, a backyard shed, or an empty room. Any place that you can put up some shelves and heat with a radiating heater will work just fine. Instead of yielding millions upon millions of crickets each week like the large industrial cricket farms, a cricket micro farm is designed to give a smaller harvest. Yielding anywhere from 100 to 100,000 crickets per week, all the while maintaining the proper agricultural practices of the larger industrial farms that result in the successful propagation of the species.
The Internet has all kinds of information on how to “Raise and Breed Crickets”, but when you examine the practices recommended, you find that they are actually aimed at “keeping” crickets, not propagating the species agriculturally. The methods found for “keeping” crickets online are counter-productive to long term cricket farming, and will eventually result in the demise of the farm.
Cricket farming isn’t as easy as you might think, either. Many have tried though, especially in the last few years following the 2013 United Nations FAO report that prophesied by 2050 we’ll need to be relying on other sources of protein, like insects, via more sustainable farming practices, and they singled out the cricket as the ideal insect. Since then, there has been a meteoric rise of cricket farms and cricket flour producers. Unfortunately, about 90% of these companies have been failing in the first year.
Many of the powder producers had to shut down because the demand is so high, that they couldn’t keep up unless they farmed the crickets themselves. And because many of the farms that started up during the initial phases of what I call this “Entomaphagy Craze” went diving headlong into a farming practice that isn’t anything like planting seeds and watching them grow with a little water and TLC…well, it was painful to watch. It was like watching a big crowd of angry Kung Fu students surrounding Bruce Lee go in one by one, and one by one ending up on the ground.
But that’s another story.
Cricket Micro Farming is simply large scale industrial cricket farming scaled down and made simple. Not easy, but simple. Anybody who can successfully micro farm crickets can easily scale up and farm crickets on a larger scale at any time. My farm filled my entire basement (it’s a big basement, housing several million crickets at any given time) and for over a decade I supplied several local pet stores with live crickets.
It can be a very profitable venture. When you consider that after all costs are calculated, including electricity and all other expenses, micro farming crickets costs you about $3.00 per 1000 crickets to produce (plus/minus, region dependent). The average pet store in America is paying about $25 per 1000 crickets including shipping, and sells them individually for 10 cents a piece or $100 per 1000 crickets. They would also prefer to buy locally–less dead loss and no shipping charges.
Or if you are wanting the crickets for your own table, in the form of cricket powder or whole crickets, you can produce enough crickets to feed your family and sell some on the side. You can even sell crickets to local restaurants, as so many are getting into promoting bug-based cuisine these days.
Not only can it be profitable, but cricket micro farming is also fun, relaxing, and very rewarding.
But that’s another story, too.
The world needs more cricket farmers. Chirp chirp, baby! ~Cricket Man
Stock photo from Shutterstock.
