
Tiny Farms Raises Seed Round as Cricket Farming Heats Up - DanI-S
https://agfundernews.com/tiny-farms-raises-seed-round-from-a-zuckerberg-as-cricket-farming-heats-up5396.html
======
duncancarroll
As someone who once owned geckos and fed them with crickets, the memory of the
smell alone is enough to deter me from ever eating any cricket-based product.

~~~
felipemora
Seafood can be quite stinky also and yet lots of people have no problem eating
it.

~~~
jonnathanson
Exactly. And honestly, if you've ever eaten a whole, unpeeled shrimp or prawn
before, it's not _too_ much of a stretch going from there to something like
crickets. They are both arthropods. They are distantly related. They look
kinda-sorta-not-too-dissimilar in their natural state.

The key difference is size. There's a lot more meat in your typical prawn, and
this allows you to peal and prep it in a way that distances you from its
natural appearance. There's less meat inside the cricket, so you pretty much
have to eat it whole, shell and all. The resulting texture is less meaty and
more mealy/crunchy.

In my experience eating crickets, I've always been aware that I'm eating
crickets. There is no fantastic way to mitigate the texture and the mouthfeel,
shy of grinding up the crickets into a powder and reconstituting them in some
other form.

(The texture doesn't bug me per se, but it sure does seem to bug a lot of
people who've tried crickets. No pun intended.)

~~~
duncancarroll
It's possible some crickets are less stinky than others. But man, that
smell... Shrimp, etc don't stink like that.

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ilaksh
If there really isn't a way to do even small scale fish or eggs efficiently
then we don't need to eat insects if that isn't part of our culture. There are
plenty of other satisfying ways to get adequate protein, such as nuts and
beans. Hundreds of millions of people live healthy lives without meat or
insects.

An approach to making it more tractable to meet food needs is to integrate it
back into our urban/suburban environments and take advantage of advanced
indoor farming which can be carefully monitored and tended by humans or
robots, which can dramatically reduce resource usage for agriculture and
greatly improve land use.

[http://tinyvillages.org](http://tinyvillages.org)

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aurizon
I can not wait to see a 2000 pound cricket, bred for size by conventional
means...;)

~~~
maxerickson
Sorry to step on your harmless joke, but big insects can't breathe:

[https://bioteaching.wordpress.com/2012/03/24/gigantism-in-
in...](https://bioteaching.wordpress.com/2012/03/24/gigantism-in-insects/)

~~~
Mz
While that exact realization did make me stop being freaked out by giant
spiders in movies, technically "they can't breathe" _in earth 's current
atmosphere._ Presumably, if it was worth the expense involved, you could grow
giant insects in closed biomes with higher oxygen levels and (I assume) higher
atmospheric pressure.

Also: Jurassic Park is BS for the same reason. The T Rex would not function in
earth's current atmosphere -- at least not without tampering with their
physiology and/or some kind of extra support system.

~~~
maxerickson
Even then they probably didn't get much bigger than a cat.

[http://listverse.com/2013/01/14/10-prehistoric-bugs-that-
cou...](http://listverse.com/2013/01/14/10-prehistoric-bugs-that-could-
seriously-mess-you-up/)

The huge dragonflys were still only somewhere between a crow and raven in
size.

~~~
Mz
Well, I don't know what the limits would be on size, but you seem to be
presuming that historical limits are hard limits. I think that is as much a
mistake as assuming current sizes are hard limits. It might take crazy levels
of oxygen and pressure or it might be undoable, but if we were to create
environments for this purpose, hell, why stick to recreating historic earth
conditions?

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SatoshiRoberts
Chocolate dipped crickets actually doesn't sound that bad. It could be a
hipster's crunch bar in a few years.

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taylorbuley
Unfortunately for them this reminds me of pigeons!
[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/05/magazine/the-pigeon-
king-a...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/05/magazine/the-pigeon-king-and-the-
ponzi-scheme-that-shook-canada.html)

------
wnevets
IIRC it's been shown that cricket farming at scale is no more effective than
cow/chicken farming

~~~
DanI-S
I'm one of the founders of Tiny Farms. I think you're probably recalling an
article published in PLOS ONE last year that suggested the sustainability of
crickets might not meet the hype.

We were obviously very interested in the study! It turns out that the paper
missed some crucial factors that make insects a sustainable, efficient protein
source.

I guest-wrote this post with some details; do take a look if you're
interested.

[http://blog.exoprotein.com/crickets-vs-
chicken/](http://blog.exoprotein.com/crickets-vs-chicken/)

~~~
bduerst
Sooo tl;dr: is that chickens use more water, produce more manure, and tend to
be butchered away from the farms, but the study was still correct in it's food
to protein conversions being almost the same between poultry and crickets?

~~~
DanI-S
I guess I'd summarize the feed conversion part as follows:

\- Crickets are slightly better than poultry at converting poultry feed into
protein.

\- Crickets are great at converting processed grocery store waste into
protein; poultry can't do this at all.

\- Both species are awful at converting low quality food waste (a mix of
chicken poop and straw) into protein.

\- The efficient feed conversion of modern poultry comes only after years of
research, development and breeding; the efficient feed conversion of insects
comes "out of the box" and will only improve over time.

~~~
GordonS
> Both species are awful at converting low quality food waste (a mix of
> chicken poop and straw) into protein

Wait - what? Do farmers really try to feed their chickens with chicken shit?!

~~~
wodenokoto
That's pretty much how we got Mad Cow Disease [1]

    
    
        A British and Irish inquiry into BSE concluded the 
        epizootic was caused by cattle, which are normally 
        herbivores, being fed the remains of other cattle 
        in the form of meat and bone meal (MBM), which 
        caused the infectious agent to spread
    

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopathy)

~~~
bduerst
They were giving the cows feed that was salted with protein sourced from
ground up sheep, of which there were trace amounts of neurological tissue
containing the prions.

It's not unusual for farmers to add amino acids as a supplement to feed. It's
one of the targets for high-nitrogen (amino acid) GM corn.

------
GordonS
I think if they are going to sell at volume, it has to be as animal feed. I
just can't see enough people wanting to eat crickets themselves - but most of
those people probably don't care what the animals they are eating were fed
with.

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clebio
> Farms raise seed round

Pun intended??

~~~
tosseraccount
GMOney cricket !

------
noondip
> The tiny insects have been eaten in developing nations for centuries, but
> now consumers in the Western world are increasingly accepting them as an
> efficient and sustainable source of protein.

Every food has protein in it. Bananas have protein. Tomatoes have protein. All
plant foods have a complete amino acid profile fit for human consumption. In
fact, protein is the easiest macronutrient to get enough of, provided caloric
needs are being met. So it's perplexing why eating insects is billed as a
'sustainable source of protein'. Is it more sustainable than say, rice or
potatoes?

~~~
theandrewbailey
When you want to eat protein, what do you eat? Meat. It usually comes from
livestock (chicken, pork, beef, fish, etc). Crickets are far more sustainable
than those conventional sources of protein.

~~~
noondip
As I had explained in the parent comment, all food has protein, so it's not
necessary to specially source it from a particular food. Especially when that
food appears extremely unpalatable (or am I the only one who doesn't salivate
at the sight of crickets?).

~~~
jqm
All food may have protein, but all food does not have essential amino acids
(which cannot be made by your body) in the quantities required to maintain
health. This is why non-meat eaters must be sure to add certain foods (or
certain combination of foods) to their diet if they want to stay healthy. Not
bagging on vegetarianism, but the idea you can get sufficient protein by just
eating any old plant is.... wrong. And animal protein is a far easier and
certain way to get essential amino acids. This from a guy who was a vegetarian
for a number of years.

~~~
noondip
> All food may have protein, but all food does not have essential amino acids
> (which cannot be made by your body) in the quantities required to maintain
> health.

> the idea you can get sufficient protein by just eating any old plant is....
> wrong.

You're quite mistaken. If what you say were true, a warning of it would be
clearly made by medical and nutritional authorities. Alas, no respectable
organization says it, precisely because it's a myth. You can easily search on
Google to find evidence which contradicts your post. Here are just the first
two results I found when looking at potatoes as an example:

> The high nutritive value of potato protein can be understood when its
> composition is compared with that of whole wheat (Table 2). Apart from
> histidine, it contains substantially more of all the essential amino-acids ;
> this superiority is particularly striking for lysine, the amount present
> being similar to that in a typical animal protein.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/13536266](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/13536266)

> For a 120 pound adult, five potatoes (960 calories) supply over 100% of the
> recommended intake for all essential amino acids.

> It's pretty difficult for an adult to eat a plant-based, vegetarian diet
> that doesn't provide all EAAs, as long as caloric needs are met.

> Finally - The pool of AAs that our body uses to manufacture its own proteins
> isn't limited by what we eat. Normal daily turnover of our cells provides a
> substantial pool from which to draw amino acids. Bacteria that line our
> colon also manufacture AAs, including EAAs, that we can utilize.

> It is a misconception that plants provide "incomplete protein", regardless
> of what Ms. Lappe advanced in her 1971 book, "Diet For A Small Planet."

[http://fanaticcook.blogspot.com/2008/04/if-all-you-ate-
were-...](http://fanaticcook.blogspot.com/2008/04/if-all-you-ate-were-
potatoes-youd-get.html)

~~~
jqm
for a 120 pound adult....

But I weigh over 200 pounds. So 9+ potatoes a day from me to get all the
essential amino acids. That's a pretty high starch to protein ratio and would
be nearly my whole intake in calories to get a bare minimum of amino acids.
Essentials aside, is that enough protein? Also at that point I would have
fulfilled my daily requirement of calories but be still be short vitamins A,
K, E, calcium, selenium, fatty acids and who knows what else.

That aside, potatoes are one plant. I don't dispute you can eat certain plants
or combinations of plants to get all essential amino acids. To restate "the
idea you can get sufficient protein by eating just any old plant is... wrong".
It is. You'd be in serious nutrition trouble if you tried to live on just
broccoli or lettuce. You have to carefully balance your diet as a healthy
vegetarian and it is far easier just to add some animal protein.

For the record I still eat a "mostly" vegetarian diet. But not completely. And
I feel a lot better and have more energy than when I did ate a full vegetarian
diet.

------
hendekagon
nope

