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

  • wax_worm_futures [comrade/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I would say that in terms of land use, it is several times, if not tens of times, more economically productive than conventional monocrop agriculture. Our insects are, after all, a value-added product in a way.

    Energy is a big expense, not completely sure. I don't have access to the company finances and it's not likely that I soon will; I'll have to do more digging to really find out. I made my estimates on profitability by considering the electric bills for apartments I've lived in and scaling them up to the building space at work. You could build something more insulated but the tradeoff would be costlier construction for cheaper heating. And if you built it out of cob or strawbale or something then it'd be less cost but more labor.

    We spray a lot of water in cleaning. The water we use for the crickets to drink is not that much. Washing out our trays/pans/jars takes up several times more water than a large household, but that could be economized too.

    I'll combine several questions into one by saying that if you did a little bit of optimization and if everyone knew what they were doing, then with 7-10 FTEs, you could probably have a modest operation in a 10,000-square-foot facility that rivaled the production level of any of the smaller sectors at my work. Maybe one tenth of the total equipment and structures and facilities and personnel that my workplace has, give or take. You'd probably need at least a few hundred thousand to get it up and going. Or maybe I'm off with that estimate- you could grow bugs in a spare room or something and move it to a different facility once it got big and steady enough. But I still don't see the startup cost coming much below $100,000.

    EDIT: It would not make sense to farm bugs as the main feed for animals. That would be like Sisyphus rolling a large stone block up the trophic pyramid.