Cracking the market for crickets Ω and frass
PROTEIN SOURCE MAKES EXTRA BENEFIT: FERTILIZER
P ORT CR E DI T, ON T. • It’s an idyllic scene: tall pine trees line the sidewalks of the street in the Toronto suburb where Jakob Dzamba lives. Stone steps lead to his front door where Athos, a friendly black Eurasier, is always the first to greet visitors to the detached twostorey mid-century home.
But the basement- level garage tells a different story. Inside, plastic storage bins are filled with egg cartons that have been transformed into colonies for insects. Before visitors’ eyes adjust to the dim lighting, they hear the chirping cacophony of hundreds of thousands of crickets.
Dzamba is the founder of Third Millennium Farming and the garage is where he raises his bugs as a food source. The 34- year- old, a candidate for a PhD in architecture at McGill University, has created a “counter- top cricket reactor” which a family could use to create their own cricket ecosystem: the insects are fed household food waste and after six weeks, when the crickets are mature, they can be harvested and consumed.
The insects are a much more sustainable source of protein than cattle — according to the Food and Agriculture Organization, they consume six times less feed while providing three times as much protein per pound. And though long an accepted source of people’s diet in parts of Latin America and Asia, they’re now starting to trend among adventurous North American foodies. Crickets are appearing in specialty food stores, being incorporated into Bolognese sauce and protein bars. Restaurants across Canada are also allowing them to hop onto the menu, from hot chocolate topped with crickets at Vancouver’s Mink Chocolate Café to guacamole with crickets at El Catrin in Toronto and cricket tacos at Montreal’s Ta Chido.
However tr e ndy, t he North American mainstream doesn’t seem quite ready to make bugs a daily source of protein, let along farm them at home. So in the meantime, Dzamba thinks he’s found another opportunity for his crickets: selling their poop as fertilizer.
When he first started to convert his garage into a cricket farm over a year ago, Dzamba noticed that each six- week harvesting cycle produced almost as much cricket frass — the mixture of feces and the exoskeleton that crickets shed eight to 10 times as they grow to maturity — as it did actual crickets, measured by weight.
“We started to use it ( as fertilizer) in our backyard and had positive results,” Dzamba says. “Then I disseminated some to friends, family and acquaintances. It was all positive anecdotal evidence. We started to think that maybe there is more to it than it just being a fertilizer, because some of the plants were infected with insects and (we) noticed that those insects started to disappear.”
Now Dzamba hopes selling cricket frass can help finance his research into insect farming and sustainable urban planning — and he’s collaborating with one of the largest insect farms in Canada, the Norwood, Ont.based Entomo Farms.
Though Entomo Farms only officially started farmi ng crickets f or human consumption in 2014, its owners, brothers Darren, Jarrod and Ryan Goldin had more than a decade of experience running an industrial cricket farm.
“My brothers have been farming crickets for 12 years, for another business called Reptile Feeders — that’s where all the experience come from,” said Jarrod Goldin.
Due to the scale of their farm, they produce large amounts of both crickets and frass. “We can harvest around 10,000 to 12,000 pounds ( of crickets) per month per 20,000 square feet barn. And we can get 50 per cent of that (weight) in frass — so around 6,000 pounds of frass, per barn per month,” Goldin says. The Goldins recently launched Frass Forward, a division of the company focused on marketing frass as fertilizer.
Entomo Farms and Dzamba are looking to implement a cargo container- si zed cricket farm, similar to the garage cricket farm at Dzamba’s house in size and setup, at Humber College in Toronto, where multiple faculties can participate, from cooking with crickets to using frass in its arboretum. ( One theory holds that chitin, the fibrous substance found in crickets’ shells, is the main element in the frass that boosts its power as a fertilizer.)
“This particular project has the potential to involve students from across the college, from media studies, culinary, architecture, landscaping,” said Humber’s Amanda Brown who is managing the project in her role as research partnership development manager.
Though this kind of research is new, cricket frass has been used in farming for decades — it just hasn’t been advertised widely.
“A lot of the advertising is by word of mouth,” says Robert Brown, a representative of Bricko Farms, one of the earliest producers of cricket frass in North America. Bricko has been selling a product called Kricket Krap since 1984. Based in Augusta, Ga., Bricko Farms was originally a compost business that happened to be located beside Ghann’s Cricket Farm, which produced crickets as reptile feed. Owners of Ghann’s Cricket Farm would toss some of the cricket remains into the grass of their property and saw growth increase exponentially. Bill Bricker and Ed Hensley, owners of Brikco Farms, was invited to use the mixture and saw positive results in their own gardens and started to manufacture cricket frass as an all- natural fertilizer.
The Canadian Organic Growers, a non-profit organization focused on organic growing, confirms there’s potential i nterest in the product among their members. “In terms of an organic fertilizer we want to encourage the use of this,” says Janine Gibson, one of COG’s national board members. The organization intends to broaden its standards about organic fertilizers to include cricket frass, as their current insect- based listing is limited to worm castings.
Despite all t he i nterest and potential for commercial success, ultimately Dzamba’s dream envisions future urban dwellings with their own ecosystem, where food scraps can feed insects, insects are consumed as a protein source and insect frass feeds the plants.
“There are 10,000 and more species of edible insects,” he says. “This is just what crickets can do. Once we start looking into others, the possibilities are endless.”