I work at a farm that produces live feed, mostly for pet stores and zoos. I've been working there full-time for a year-ish, amd I have experience with the production of Tenebrio spp. (mealworm beetles), Galleria spp. (waxworm moths), and Acheta spp. (house crickets). This includes every stage of the life cycle: egg + larva + pupa + adult for the "worms", and egg + nymph + adult for the crickets. The "worms" are sold as larvae for optimum nutritional value and trophic return-on-input, whereas the crickets are sold as adults. My job is one of the "dirty jobs" at the farm. Well, everyone's job there is dirty, but I'm one of the ones scooping feed, breathing clouds of bug shit, handling the product and sometimes having it crawl all over us, being swarmed by moths and beetles and flies, and dodging cockroaches. It's not as terrible as it might sound but it's definitely not clean.
This is a throwaway account that I'll be checking as much as I can today and tomorrow and maybe Monday too. I do not do push notifications or phone notifications and I'm not extremely online enough to respond to everything within 5 minutes, but I'll be logged on at least once an hour for this today. I will respond to every single question if I can, it just might take awhile. If you know or have an inkling of what my main is, shh, plz dun dox. After this AMA is complete I may abandon this account, I only made it for this (plus the bit).
To clear a few things up, YES, I have eaten the product, and YES, I do have a deep hatred for the careerist, corporate-ladder-climbing administrative class. Any other resemblences to a similar username are coincidental.
-WwF
Lowest point- Pulling out a tray and finding out that it's full of cockroaches. Or having a week where all I do is scraping bugs off wood and plastic and cardboard, getting their guts all over me.
Highest point- So there are several different species that kinda end up living alongside mealworms. One day I found a simple, low-energy, and highly effective way to separate them out. A lot of coworkers spend an hour a day just trying to vacuum up the "pests", so this made me feel like a pro.
Also, I've gotten to the point where I understand how to run the operation as well as the boss does, and seeing our production numbers rise and fall and knowing what's behind it is very gratifying. It's not super hard to know these things but it kinda thrills me to see the bosses making mistakes or failing to make improvements that I could easily remediate.
About bug farming? It's not too hard. You can do it pretty much anywhere. If you have middlings from any grain available in bulk you can probably do it. The hardest parts are containment, along with the energy cost of keeping it 28-30°C all the time. Unless you make some sort of breakthrough in efficiency, though, it's mostly just going to be food for captive reptiles/amphibians/birds.