Meet Madison Cricket Farm's two million critters - Channel3000.com - WISC-TV3

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DEFOREST, Wis. — Kevin Bachhuber is not your average Midwest farmer.
He’s a cricket farmer who has about two million crickets, hatching about 500,000 a week. It’s not exactly what he had hoped for as a child in Green Bay.
He started eating crickets on a trip to Thailand in 2006, and when the United Nations said that humans should start eating insects to help with world hunger, one thing led to another.
“We ended up moving to Ohio where we had big cricket farms, which was my first cricket farm; it later became the U.S.’ first FDA-inspected human food-grade insect farm,” said Bachhuber, the owner and operator of Madison Cricket Farm.
He shared that technique with the industry and got a lot of buzz from it. He gave TED Talks and even started his own consulting firm for insect agriculture, which is still his day job.
But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, he moved home and opened the Madison Cricket Farm, harvesting non-food-grade crickets.
“Some weeks we were probably shipping about 240,000 crickets and we’re trying to get up to like 400,000 a week,” he said.
They’re shipped to pet stores, mostly local ones. It’s only a side gig, but he’ll generate up to $300,000 in gross cricket revenue each year.
The crickets are kept at 88 degrees and 40% humidity and are mostly self-sustaining.
When asked how he manages so many critters, he said, “I’ve been doing this for a long time and can kind of like glance in a box and know how many crickets are in that box; you just develop a feel for it.”
The question remains: as the Cricket King, does he eat them?
“I definitely still eat crickets, but I wouldn’t eat these crickets; they’re not raised to be food grade, and there’s a really distinct flavor difference between the ones geckos eat and the ones people eat,” he said.
He prefers his with some sesame oil and ginger.
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