do a search on twitter for "eating bugs" and you'll find lots of strange soulless fascist freaks who apparently don't live in the real world where people are already eating animal feed (what % of dog food is eaten by people? you will never hear these PMC class traitors talk about that on their woke "revolutionary" arts and culture podcast!)
woke radlibs who LARP as communists on twitter: "Seize the means of production! you can't create something out of nothing...we need to keep extracting things from the earths to live...We need to support Actually Existing Socialist states who are doing clean industrial production"
Actual scientists who have visited a farm for once in their lives: "Seize the means of waste decomposition and circular economy recycling! Check out this research paper from 1989 about feeding fungus to crickets and then feeding crickets to birds and then feeding birds to a different fungus and them feeding that fungus to fatten up African cane rats. Actually Existing Ecology is more advanced than anything the technocratic redditors can sell to their profit oriented bosses"
I have farmed bugs in a formal setting. It still takes a lot of agricultural inputs, just not nearly as much as beef or pork.
How does it compare to beans?
Disfavorably. You're going up a trophic level, so the bugs are going to end up consuming maybe 2-3 times their body mass in soy or corn or wheat over their lifetime.
The operation is not super complex, but there's a much higher barrier to entry than an eighth of an acre of bean trellises or Three Sisters.