So far, the crickets have been pretty successful. I’ve been building the colony and harvesting here and there, but mostly, trying to get the numbers up to have consistent harvests. Before I knew the dehydration problem was happening, I was getting about 66 grams per bin. I believe that number is kind of low as my production methods were still kind of rough. Now that I have the premature dehydration figured out, the bins are chock full of crickets. At least, it sure looks like there are more crickets in the bins at this point. So lets say I get about 3 or 4 ounces per bin. Gosh I hope my math is correct here… Most fish foods are around 32% protein. If you take 32% of 16 ounces, that is 5.12 ounces of protein needed to make one pound of fish food. My fish are eating about a pound a day.

Crickets are 60% protein as dry meal so I need about 8.2 ounces of cricket to get the 5.12 ounces of protein to make 32% protein fish food.

I need to harvest about 2 bins per day to keep up with demand. With a 6 week life cycle, that means I need 84 bins up and running to stay afloat. I believe I can shorten that cycle a bit by having breeding pods to sort of crank out the babies. That’s the next step. But working with what I know, this is totally doable and not a huge amount of work to do.

These numbers reflect only crickets as the protein source. I plan to add spirulina into the mix, but I’ve been feeding it to the crickets! I am going to expand spirulina production to a couple large troughs to have enough for everyone. I will also supplement the fish food making with worms and when the soldier fly larvae start producing, there should be enough protein to start working on different blends. It will be exciting to see how the fish and poultry perform.