Overhead of a Cricket Farm

We briefly investigated how expensive it would actually be to start a cricket farm: 

• 10,000 square feet of cricket farm overhead is about 100,000$. 

• cricket eggs go for about 60$ for 60,000 eggs (Premium Crickets) 

• Assuming an imperfect birth rate with about 85% eggs growing to full size crickets, leads to about 51,000 crickets for 60$ without food cost

•  From the CO2 analysis, each box used in a cricket farm contains approximately 51,000 crickets at ~50 lbs total weight after growth. 

• The 10,000 square feet farm leads to approximately 320 boxes (at the low end), therefore to fill every box requires 19,000$

• The cost to grow a cricket is hard to pin down from electricity cost of a heat lamp, and the amount of feed required

• A common heat lamp can be purchased for 10$ and consumes about 250W on average (Amazon)

• 1 heat lamp per box will suffice which leads to 320 heatlamps adding a total of 3200$.

• To operate these lamps 24/7, there will be a power draw of 8kW. And at 24 hours a day this will be a full 192kWh per day. 

• At a cost of approximately 10 cents per kWh, each day will cost 19.2$ per day to run. 

• At the very least, to simply obtain the insects and space to grow them, requires at least $123,200 

• Then each day will have up keep cost in order for both feed and electricity. At the moment, we do not have estimates for feed, but we know the cost of electricity per day.

• Once grown, processing costs need to be pinned down.

• However, through all that, cricket flour can be sold at approximately 13$ a pound (Cricket Flours)

• 5300 pounds of cricket flour every 2 months means it is valued at $68,000 for the going rate of 13$ a pound, so after 2 development cycles, or 4 months, the initial cost is already made up for. 

• Sources have cricket flour up at 40$ a pound back in 2012, but through Moore's law and increasing production, cost have been going down(Schwartz)

There is significant cost to setting up a cricket farm, but the maintenance in general is really just the heat lamps and feed; however, feed for crickets can be as simple as produce scraps.  With a quick development cycle and easy care, cricket farms are a financially viable option going forward.