I work at a farm that produces live feed, mostly for pet stores and zoos. I've been working there full-time for a year-ish, amd I have experience with the production of Tenebrio spp. (mealworm beetles), Galleria spp. (waxworm moths), and Acheta spp. (house crickets). This includes every stage of the life cycle: egg + larva + pupa + adult for the "worms", and egg + nymph + adult for the crickets. The "worms" are sold as larvae for optimum nutritional value and trophic return-on-input, whereas the crickets are sold as adults. My job is one of the "dirty jobs" at the farm. Well, everyone's job there is dirty, but I'm one of the ones scooping feed, breathing clouds of bug shit, handling the product and sometimes having it crawl all over us, being swarmed by moths and beetles and flies, and dodging cockroaches. It's not as terrible as it might sound but it's definitely not clean.

This is a throwaway account that I'll be checking as much as I can today and tomorrow and maybe Monday too. I do not do push notifications or phone notifications and I'm not extremely online enough to respond to everything within 5 minutes, but I'll be logged on at least once an hour for this today. I will respond to every single question if I can, it just might take awhile. If you know or have an inkling of what my main is, shh, plz dun dox. After this AMA is complete I may abandon this account, I only made it for this (plus the bit).

To clear a few things up, YES, I have eaten the product, and YES, I do have a deep hatred for the careerist, corporate-ladder-climbing administrative class. Any other resemblences to a similar username are coincidental.

-WwF

  • kidleviathan [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    What's been the highest and lowest point as a bug farmer? What's something you wish people knew about your profession?

    • wax_worm_futures [comrade/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Lowest point- Pulling out a tray and finding out that it's full of cockroaches. Or having a week where all I do is scraping bugs off wood and plastic and cardboard, getting their guts all over me.

      Highest point- So there are several different species that kinda end up living alongside mealworms. One day I found a simple, low-energy, and highly effective way to separate them out. A lot of coworkers spend an hour a day just trying to vacuum up the "pests", so this made me feel like a pro.

      Also, I've gotten to the point where I understand how to run the operation as well as the boss does, and seeing our production numbers rise and fall and knowing what's behind it is very gratifying. It's not super hard to know these things but it kinda thrills me to see the bosses making mistakes or failing to make improvements that I could easily remediate.

      About bug farming? It's not too hard. You can do it pretty much anywhere. If you have middlings from any grain available in bulk you can probably do it. The hardest parts are containment, along with the energy cost of keeping it 28-30°C all the time. Unless you make some sort of breakthrough in efficiency, though, it's mostly just going to be food for captive reptiles/amphibians/birds.

    • wax_worm_futures [comrade/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      To add to what's worth knowing, the profit margins are pretty fantastic. The company I work for has a lot of waste and a lot of things they haven't figured out, but if my estimations are right, they are still absolutely making bank. Not a lot of the revenue trickles down to the regular workers at the bottom though. If it was a worker cooperative, all of the workers would be quite financially well-off, by any state's standards.

        • wax_worm_futures [comrade/them]
          ·
          3 years ago

          Yes! In fact, I first had the idea several months before I even found out about my current workplace.

          The biggest issue would be startup capital. You'd need to put up a bunch of glorified sheds, you'd need the HVAC systems to keep it like a hot and humid summer day all the time, you'd need deliveries of feed and all the long-tail expenses of running a business like this. I think you would probably want at least half a mil to get off the ground.

          There are several other cooperative communal business ideas that I think are both more essential and easier to get off the ground.

            • wax_worm_futures [comrade/them]
              ·
              3 years ago

              Possibly. To an extent, you want to maximize your floor space and minimize the total volume of air, so you want something pretty flat. If you could heat (and perhaps humidify) the warehouse, I see no reason why not. Tbh we have a couple warehouses on site and our grow rooms are like warehouses with more insulation.

              • nat_turner_overdrive [he/him]
                ·
                3 years ago

                Cool, I'm going to read up on this stuff, it sounds very interesting! On the coop/communal tip, what do you think is a better pursuit? I hate my job and would like to live in a communal setting so I'd love to hear ideas

                edit: fungus and other farming stuff seems pretty good to me

              • Owl [he/him]
                ·
                3 years ago

                A multistory warehouse should be more efficient to heat than a single story building with the same square footage and ceiling height. They're not terribly common, but worth knowing in case you happen to find one.

                • wax_worm_futures [comrade/them]
                  ·
                  3 years ago

                  But then you need to carry things up and down stairs. Or have a really expensive elevator. The best solution is to find a way to only switch stuff from floor to floor in bags, and have every floor be a subunit.