- [Voiceover] North of Los Angeles
tucked away in the San Fernando Valley,
a small team of urban farmers are doing their part
to offer up a sustainable source of protein, crickets.
Why crickets?
Well there's a lot of people in the world.
7.3 billion as of 2015 according to a UN report
and that same report projects it
will hit 8.5 billion by 2030, 9.7 billion by
2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100.
So that's a lot more people and people got to eat.
This poses a problem because if the global population
does cross the 9 billion mark by 2050,
the Food and Agricultural Administration estimates
that the world food production will have to increase
by roughly 70%, yikes.
So are crickets the answer?
The boys at Koala Valley Farm thinks so.
We talked with Peter, Aka Mama Bear
and Elliot, aka Big Dog.
I didn't ask about the nicknames, it seemed rude.
- We talked the end of 2014 and Elliot had stumbled
across this completely new idea of farming crickets.
- Everyone's got their own little niche so far
and ours kind of focuses on the green
and just kind of the more a different style
of farming all together.
- These crickets are literally the
happiest crickets you'll ever find.
- Most pampered, I would say pampered is the word.
- [Voiceover] The crickets at Koala Valley Farms
live on a diet of fresh veggies grown for
the most part directly on the premises.
- [Elliot] Our crickets are vegan crickets.
- Do other cricket farms feed their crickets like meat?
- All cricket farms abroad and most cricket farms here
feed their crickets chicken feed.
You're basically eating corn, you're
just removing yourself one step from it.
- [Voiceover] The vegetation is supported by numerous
aquaponics systems in which the water used
to hydrate the plants is enriched by
the bodily waste of fish and crawdads.
- One time I ate a crawdad that was,
I think it was full of eggs and then I threw up.
- [Voiceover] Really?
- Yeah.
- [Voiceover] As you can see I'm kind of a crawdad
expert but as it turns out so was Elliot.
- [Elliot] So this right here is
a essentially the crawd dingus.
- [Shane] Crawd, wait that tiny little thing?
- This, yeah well this one's pretty big I mean think about-
- [Voiceover] After a few minutes we remembered that
we are not here to talk about crawdad penises
so Peter and Elliot lead me into their cricket kingdom.
First up the egg room.
- Oh it's so humid in here.
- Yeah.
- So how many, I guess I don't even, how do crickets...
- [Voiceover] So that's me searching for
the words to ask about cricket sex.
- The males deposit their sperm
on the ladies chests and legs.
She basically gets erect on top of the soil,
humps the ground repeatedly and with
each hump she deposits one egg-
- [Voiceover] We'll see some egg laying in the next room
but before then I take the time
to ask a tough but necessary question.
- You're not in the pocket of like big cricket company.
- [Elliot] No that's the thing is they're
already pretty much is big cricket.
- [Shane] There's big cricket?
- There are, yeah, there are farms in,
the farm in Georgia turns out about
20 million crickets every six weeks.
At our peak capacity in this space alone
we can only crank out about 3.5.
- [Voiceover] In the next room, the adults.
Here they live out the rest of
their days in leisurely bliss.
- [Shane] These are all mating?
- [Elliot] All of these are mating yeah.
These are the grutris.
so you can see the females kind of digging around-
- [Voiceover] We even see a cricket laying her eggs
and it's just as spell binding as promised.
- Yeah you see the humping right there?
- [Shane] Oh look at those humps.
- [Elliot] Yeah that one is vicious.
- [Shane] She worse, she's showing off.
So these guys just hang out, have sex,
lay eggs and eat, it's like Club Med.
- [Elliot] For crickets.
- [Voiceover] The crickets will hang out here,
living longer than they ever would in the wild
and they'll be humanely euthanized,
slowly frozen to assimilate a natural frost.
From there they'll be dry roasted and turned into food.
One of Koala Valley's staple products is
their charmingly named Cricket Breast
which is so popular that they're,
unfortunately, out of stock during our visit
but they also have chocolate covered crickets
which we try and find pretty palatable.
- You might notice a leg or two later
on when you're driving home.
- [Voiceover] So are insects going to start working
their way into our diets, maybe.
If cricket meat does have the potential to help the world,
these guys are pretty modest about it,
but they're also passionate.
I half jokingly asked them about their feelings towards
the little critters and Elliot's answer is probably
the most oddly sentimental thing
anybody can say about crickets.
- Do you find yourself with a special fondness for them?
- We haven't taken a vacation yet but I've had to take
several personal days because of just, you know,
trial and error sometimes things don't go the way
you think and you lose some lives and then it happens
and you learn from it but spending as much time
around them as you do, you just learn a lot about them.
They're very skittish creatures, they're simple minded
and they just do what they're, what they know to do.
You begin to feel for them.
- [Shane] Yeah.
(upbeat music)