- Dec 17, 2014
- 10
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Hello, All!
This is our first post, please enjoy!
Our foray into raising insects started innocently enough. As a young teenager I was constantly at the local auction, buying and selling all sorts of poultry. I ordered my first bugs back then and was promptly delivered a large, crawling bag of mealworms. Although that project never did take off (in about a month I had more mites than I had chickens, mealworms or patience!), we can say that's the spark that ignited the flame.
A few years later I began to get involved in reptiles as well as poultry and was introduced to the Dubia Roach. I ordered 40 mixed size Dubias and received them in the mail. I paid little attention to the colony then and had no intentions of ever feeding them to my chickens. It's not I thought it was bad or unsafe, but there was still an "ew" factor, I suppose.
As a young man I moved to a sprawling farm in Tennessee and left the hustle and bustle of the Philadelphia suburbs. I sold all of my reptiles and birds, but I did keep the colony of roaches - which with minimal effort had ballooned to a couple of thousand, even while feeding a large amount of reptiles.
I realized the full potential of raising insects on that farm in West Tennessee. I can pinpoint the day - the moment - when it popped into my head. I was on my own small farm on which I was working night and day. It was my first winter, and as things always are on beginning self-sufficient projects - times were hard. I had bit off a little more than I could chew in the bright, optimistic days of summer and therefore had left myself short of supply for the colder months.
I walked into the laundry room while pacing one night and saw my nearly-overflowing bin of roaches. The answer was very clear to me. I started reaching out to neighbors and friends and collecting enough "food waste" to keep my colony booming. By the following spring I had hatched enough chicks off my insect-fed chickens to make all my pacing and frustrations a distant memory by the following winter.
Now - years after that hard winter - that realization has far surpassed helping my humble home farm. I have raised many species of poultry using many different feeders and insect farm techniques, and currently raise Coturnix quail with bug protein as the primary protein source. I started breeding for my own insect business and we moved back to the Philadelphia area to produce insects on a large scale. The Insectivore Company now sells insects to a variety of hobbyists from self-sufficient homesteaders to bird lovers to disaster preppers.
We hope you enjoyed our post, thank you for reading!
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