Cricket farming - Dash Hall

An important thing to do for any kayaker is eating. At Keeners we are privileged enough to have daily meals prepared for us (with varying quality) and a fridge stacked with food to snack on (plus a giant tub of Nutella). Making sure you get your daily calories is important to keep your body/health in shape with the long days of kayaking. However, in many parts of the world people lack the ability to get their daily calories. World hunger right now is on the rise, according to the UN’s report 10% of people globally are suffering from malnutrition. So I present a solution to this crisis, vertical cricket farming.

First let's look at how efficient per space most modern day crops and cattle are. We can say an acre of beta rice (probably the densest most nutritional  grain I know of that's GMOd in 3rd world countries to have a ton of nutrients, grows fast and is compact) gives us 10000 nutritional meals of rice per yield 12 times per year (120000 meals total per 1 acre). Using that same acre we can harvest GMOd cattle in cages at 10000 meals of beef per year (assuming these cattle have been bred and fed to correct size in only a yr). Now these #s are light estimates but they show us how effective crops and cattle may become in the future.

However there’s an even more efficient way to produce food, bugs. Using crickets as an example (they come to mind as commonly eaten and nutritious, but you could swap them out for whatever bug that’s small, low resource, breeds fast, and has high nutritional value) getting an acre tall skyscraper, of wall to wall, floor to floor, of cricket breeding containers, you could easily get millions of cricket meals per month (or whatever timespan crickets breed in to full size, I assume it’s relatively fast). Now if we genetically modify those crickets like we do with plants and animals today, we could the breeding times down to weeks and nutritional value even higher than it is now, increasing cricket production 10 fold. So 10s of millions of crickets worth of food, that would be super easy to produce, maintain, and they’d be cheap in whatever mass produced cricket protein bar you could buy compared to all the usual horizontal farming methods known today.

The main issue that cricket farming would run into is not that many people enjoy eating bugs. So first you’d introduce into cultures that already readily eat bugs, then into cultures with more diverse palates (southeast Asian cuisine), and then introduce to the youth of western civilizations from birth. A child whose grown up eating bugs will think of them as the norm, and if their friends and family eat then as well it will catch on as a societal norm. Though this would be akin to brainwashing an entire generation and onwards into eating bugs, within an authoritarian state such as China, such is easily possible atm. Even if you don’t brainwash the population in eating crickets, by simply finding a way to make them really good and then getting celebrities to endorse it you could easily integrate into western meals and snacks, while also exclusively serving it(assuming it tasted good) to those of low social economic status, and replace the need for food kitchens with government subsidized vertical cricket farms.

Vertical cricket farms are by far the easiest way with our current technology to solve world hunger and sustain the exponentially growing human population on earth.