The Garage Farmer

The quiet suburban lanes of Mississauga where Jakub Dzamba lives aren't likely to house a farm. And yet, walk around the house and the basement-level garage tells a different story. The door opens to the low chirp of insects, cosily sitting in a dark room. When the lights come on, the tiny room reveals large plastic containers with egg boxes in them full of crickets. The insects are growing stronger with the help of some chicken feed that’s finely grounded for their consumption.

Dzamba is the founder of Third Millennium Farming and the garage is his attempt to getting the world eat better and healthier. A professor of architectural design at Humber college, Dzamba spends a few hours after his day-job to produce insects as a food source. The 34-year-old started with a project from college where he had to come up with the idea to build a farm on a small plot. He managed to farm enough crickets to feed a thousand. Unfortunately the ‘ick’ factor around eating bugs triumphed back then. But, Dzamba went on to create a Countertop Cricket Reactor - a countertop farm of sorts.

The unit allows you to farm crickets in your home easily. As crickets can be fed food waste, farming them inside a few plastic containers on your kitchen top isn't as costly as you may think. It is also more humane to consume these bugs as they are only harvested at the end of their life.

How To Farm Bugs

According to Dzamba there are two ways to do it. One is to feed the bugs chicken feed. As insects are cold-blooded, this works. It’s also 25 per cent more efficient to produce insects by feeding them regular livestock feed. While this is the most common method, it isn’t a 100 per cent environmentally friendly. However, its easiness is what makes it popular. Presently, Dzamba feeds his crickets chicken feed to keep costs at a minimum.

The second method - the more environmentally beneficial method - is to feed insects food waste. Bugs eat everything, more than common livestock do. This helps reduce the footprint to almost zero. After all, 99 per cent of footprint in producing meat is due to the crops produced to feed the animals. The idea to produce edible insects that could feed a thousand people without producing any footprint is what initially attracted Dzamba to bug farming.

Crickets take about seven to 10 days to mature and in the process have to be transferred to different containers in Dzamba’s garage farm. But isn’t it tough to have a farm full of the creepy crawlies in your garage? Dzamba had to learn the lesson the hard way. While first trying to perfect the Countertop Reactor, the crickets kept flying out. “I had to get my wife a hotel room on several occasions,” he says. Among issues of containment, there were also challenges with keeping a count on the bugs and figuring out if any other pests were getting in the way. However, the garage is more enclosed and Dzamba ensures that the transfer to different chambers takes place carefully. Of course, luring them with food helps.

Crickets

Crickets

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Crickets

Once the the six-week harvesting cycle comes to an end, Dzamba keeps them in the refrigerator to put them to sleep and later freezes them. Till now, this has been the most humane way to harvest the bugs. The crickets are also harvested only towards the end of their life cycle.

While Dzamba is still researching more on farming crickets and the architect in him is working on building a large-scale reactor, the crickets are turning out to be useful in different ways. What started with wasting $10 per pound worth of cricket poop to fill a hole in his arden, Dzamba later realized that the cricket excreta was working as a fertilizer. “I noticed that the pea pod plants gave twice the number of pea pods compared to the ones in which we hadn’t used the poop as a fertilizer,” he says. This has lead to Dzamba selling the cricket poop as a fertilizer under his company.

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