Farmer Sets His Sights On A New Crop: Crickets

Sept. 11, 2014, 6:30 a.m. ·

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Big Cricket Farms in Youngstown, Ohio is the first U.S. farm to grow insects exclusively for human consumption. (Photo by Anne Glausser, QUEST Ohio)

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When you’re hungry, do you reach for potato chips or peanuts? What about a handful of crickets? One daring entrepreneur is bucking the “yuck” factor and opening the first U.S. farm to grow insects exclusively for human consumption.


I went to visit this intrepid cricketeer at Big Cricket Farms, located in an old warehouse in Youngstown, Ohio. It’s the perfect place to grow crickets, according to owner Kevin Bachhuber. “So these are our babies. They’re actually hardening up right now,” Bachhuber said.

The crickets live in big, black square tents that sit right on the warehouse floor. Inside the tents are bright lights, an interior like tin foil, and stacks of Rubbermaid tubs.

Owner Kevin Bachhuber points to the tubs that house the young crickets. (Photo by Anne Glausser, QUEST Ohio)

Crack a lid on one of those tubs and you’ll find cricket city. “There are little cricket high-rises made out of egg carton. If you look here, the little tiny grains of rice things — wow, there’s a lot of them — are the eggs,” Bachhuber said.

These guys munch on organic chicken feed and mature rapidly, within two months. While some of these crickets will be sold whole at local farmers’ markets, most will be ground up and made into “cricket flour,” a nutrient-dense product that can be used in baked goods. Bachhuber says they’re in talks with energy bar companies as well as chip and cookie manufacturers who are interested in buying cricket flour in volume.

That could be because insects are such a rich source of protein and minerals. They’re commonly used in zoo and pet food. In other countries, people have been eating bugs for decades.

The crickets live in tightly-sealed tents within an old Ohio warehouse. (Photo by Anne Glausser, QUEST Ohio)

Here, though, there’s the cultural “yuck” factor to contend with.

“If I said the word ‘insect’ to the average person on the street, immediately they’ll think of a cockroach,” said Sonny Ramaswamy, the director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture within the USDA. “So there is that sort of a creepy-crawly-hairy-cockroachy type of a mental image that’s created…so that’s one thing that you’ve got to overcome.”

And there’s good reason to make the critters more approachable to Western palates, says Ramaswamy, who, by the way, cooks up curried crickets for DC crowds whenever he gets the chance. In addition to their high protein content and rapid reproduction rate, “their ecological footprint is pretty significantly lower than other things. They use a lot less resources — the amount of energy needed, the amount of water needed, the amount of land needed, and things like that,” he said.

To produce a pound of crickets requires one gallon of water and two pounds of feed, says Bachhuber. The same amount of beef requires anywhere from 400 to 2,000 gallons of water and 25 pounds of feed. “They are marvelously efficient little digesters, and growers,” Bachhuber said.

Growing crickets, or any insect for that matter, is uncharted water for regulatory agencies.

“Insect farms are new,” said Ashley McDonald with the Ohio Department of Agriculture. “They would be new to us. And we don’t regulate them at this time.”

Egg cartons are like "cricket high rises" says Bachhuber. The insects munch on organic chicken feed. (Photo by Anne Glausser, QUEST Ohio)

McDonald says they do regulate food processors, and so in that sense the operation would be treated like any other food facility when it comes to good practices.

At Big Cricket Farms, Bachhuber takes food safety to the point of self-described paranoia. “These guys should be clean and safe. We don’t want to destroy our industry before it starts or anything,” he said.

They welcome inspectors and want their operation to be a model for other startup insect farms.

The FDA is working on insect-specific regulations, but they aren’t finished yet.

As for when you can expect to see cricket on the menu or in your protein bar, it might not be that far off. Big Cricket Farms is scheduled to start shipping its product to clients this fall.

NET News is a partner in the QUEST science reporting project. QUEST is a collaboration of six public broadcasters around the country. It is a multimedia series that strives to deepen our understanding of some of today’s most pressing sustainability topics. For more QUEST science stories, click here.