What does Jow Forums think about insect farming? This is potentially the next big thing
>Cheap start up and upkeep
>Ecologically more friendly than traditional meat sources
>Humanity is already being degraded into a animal working class. Meat will be a luxury and insects seen as a staple food source.
All you need is a small space, a few thousand crickets and some plastic tubs. Their growth is exponential. Pretty much just taking money off the table
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first it was shrimp farming
then it was pigeon trapping
now it's insect farming
God I love this board.
I don't think any of us are gonna make it.
kricket farming is legit tho.
i remember really thinking about starting this when i was neet.
but people would literally rather die that not eat beef and pork, and i dont blame them
>but people would literally rather die that not eat beef and pork, and i dont blame them
this.
i would rather starve to death or fight to death over real food before i eat fucking bugs
What about tomacco farming
I think maggot farming(Black soldier fly larvae) for animal feed is a feasible startup at the moment.
Plus when someone asks what you do you can say "I'm a maggot farmer.", and that's worth more than the money in my opinion.
It has a future. Certain bugs when put under certain kinds of UV light produce significant amounts of vitamin d, which is absorbed when eaten. Natural, significant amounts of vitamin d is rare to come by, and in the future will be recognised more as the powerhouse that it is. Supplements do not work. Only other sources that have significant amounts is salmon roe and those are very expensive.
So to expound, the startup neet size business would basically be this
>Buy some black soldier fly larvae on the net
>Set up an enclosure that allows breeding
>Trays/Bins for macerated organic matter organized on racking
>Organize with literally any business that retails food, or grocers, to claim their waste for free/cheap depending on volume and competition
Then
>Sell live BSF larvae to organic farms in region
>Next capital expense is expansion to commercial property, then dehydrating equipment for unsold live BSF larvae, and packaging
From then on it's just scaling and cutting deals. Find a smaller chicken feed producer and sell them your product, citing the numerous studies about increased growth and health indicators of poultry raised on sub 10% BSF larvae included in pellets.
Outgoings for the business are incredibly minimal until you're up to large scale production, where temperature control comes in on a cost/benefit analysis.
Problems with the business is that your assets look like absolute shit to the bank. Maggot-stained tubs and specialized breeding enclosures? Worth less than nothing. So no loans.
But the ease of scalability from home grown operation to factory size supplier means you might not even have to deal with the banks.
It's what I'd be doing if I weren't getting into leasing an underutilized pub.
Insect user here. For the few of us in this, business is picking up steadily. Like anything, you have to be an early adopter and ignore the critics. It was this way for weed, crypto. Also insect farming is not even for humans to eat now, but if it goes there that will be even better for me.
Pick the right insects: crickets, bamboo worms, mealworms (you can get $20 for a small bag of mealworm poop)
Mealworms seem great, but I have to ask why mealworms when you could do BSF larvae? Orders of magnitude faster growth rate, unrivaled biomass conversion.. Is it just a matter of better marketability?
How big is the risk of some kind of bacteria or virus wiping out your entire farm?
*cough* BSF larvae create their own sterile anti-bacterial soup.
Mites are a problem with insect breeding if you're not careful.
Would you say risk aversion is a considerable money sink, or just proper work ethic?
If you are going to try and sell insects as food you are going to have to do it in a way where the insect ins't whole or alive because nobody will eat that.
You would probably have to grind it up and sell it as a protein powder or supplement or something. I would go with protein powder because I believe crickets would have more nutritional value than the standard whey and people dedicated enough to the gym to use protein powder might be willing to try something more extravagant like cricket protein if it means more gains.
The trick is to not offer an insect burger patty for $1, offer it for $15, make it exclusive, make it luxury. Hipster will buy it
I think the best avenue for insects is in stock feed supplementation. Sure, you could develop some sort of cricket-crunch bar, but in that size niche why bother growing the things yourself, just buy the food grade bugs and prepare them in a commercial kitchen and sell them.
If you have any feed suppliers, organic farms, fish farms or aquaponics operations, or even just outlets that retail to those markets then that'd be far better for volume.
I think being risk averse when selling bugs to people to eat is tantamount. It's why I'd never do it, because you're relying on hundreds of tiny start ups to not give people some exotic parasite or food poisoning. Any instance of that would set the edible bugs business back to square one at the moment.
In regards to it being a money sink, selling bugs for human consumption would be insanely expensive. Not sure about food laws in your country, but here in Australia it's nearly impossible to sell food without 100 grand to invest, let alone creepy crawlies.
Lard is full of it. Pork is easy to raise. As a plus it actually tastes good too. Don't even need special uv light for it. Just let them play around outside before killing.
No need anymore we have lab meat now
What would the market size be if you target the dog food market?
>High vitamina high protein cricket/grain mix dog biscuit
>Dehydrated insect as a specific snack treat
>Cricket/meal worm mix wet food
People pay big money to make their pets happy.
Especially with the recent spate of dogs dying en masse due to the pet food being nutritional poison.
next thing for dog food is raw meat, shops are popping up everywhere here where you can buy mostly frozen meat of different kinds
the diet is called "barf" here
I'd be quiet happy for that to catch on in my country. I looked into doing something similar a couple years ago. Didn't see much demand.
Are you in the insect business already user?
Convincing people of new food is difficult and takes years to decades.
However there's big chances in animal food production