Open Field Hopper Co.

Six legs.
Six weeks.

Crickets go from hatchling to harvest in about six weeks, on racks indoors, turning feed into protein several times more efficiently than cattle. This is the working library for a cricket and grasshopper farm: what to raise, how to raise it, what it costs, and what to cook.

Shop the farm Run the numbers
1.5–1.9 vs 6lb feed per lb gain, cricket vs feedlot steer
~1%of beef cattle's greenhouse gas per kg gained
6 wk vs 2 yrHatch to harvest

The first decision

Crickets or grasshoppers?

The hunch was that grasshoppers are in higher demand. Per pound they sell for far more. But crickets are what people actually buy week after week in the US, and the only one of the two you can farm here without a federal permit. So the farm runs on crickets and treats grasshoppers as the premium line.

Crickets

The volume business

Why they lead

  • Legal to farm and ship: the house cricket (Acheta domesticus) moves between states in the continental US with no APHIS permit.
  • Buyers already exist: reptile and amphibian keepers buy live crickets every week; pet shops restock constantly.
  • Easy on racks: dry grain feed, warm dark bins, about six weeks per batch, no fresh greens.
  • Several products from one animal: live feeders, roasted whole, flour, pet and chicken treats, and frass for gardens.

Watch out for

  • Low price per pound: roughly $22–25 retail for 1,000 live crickets, and powder at about $40/lb retail.
  • Densovirus: a cricket virus wiped out many North American farms around 2010. Biosecurity is not optional.
  • Human food is a hard sell: the world's biggest cricket plant, in Ontario, went into receivership in 2025.

Grasshoppers

The premium line

Why they're tempting

  • Price: Oaxacan chapulines retail around $10 an ounce, roughly four times cricket powder by weight.
  • Real food culture: chapulines are a centuries-old Mexican staple, eaten toasted with lime, chile, and garlic, not a novelty.
  • They're native here: species like the migratory grasshopper thrive across North American grasslands, and a non-diapause lab strain has been bred for research.

Why they can't lead yet

  • Locusts are off the table: the farmed species abroad (desert and migratory locusts) are regulated plant pests here.
  • Hard to rear: they want fresh greens daily, warmth, and lots of room. Feeder breeders say that's why US pet shops don't stock them.
  • Supply is wild-caught: US chapulines are imported from Mexican fields, and some lots have carried dangerous lead levels.

The plan

Now: farm house crickets for feeders, flour, roasted snacks, pet treats, and frass. Next: sell lab-tested imported chapulines under our label. Later: a small native-grasshopper trial, once APHIS and the state department of agriculture sign off.

Why feeders first

Pet food and live feeders are steady, repeat demand that doesn't depend on convincing anyone to eat a bug. The human-food line grows on top of that base instead of carrying the farm alone.

The library

Everything in one place

Research, references, the business plan, and recipes. Each section is its own page and grows as we add to it.

10

Cricket vs Beef scorecard

Sortable comparison of nutrition, feed, emissions, price, and the one row beef still wins: people want to eat it. Sources on every row.

Metrics compared 12

Species

Crickets, grasshoppers, locusts, and the other farmed insects, with US legal status, time to harvest, and how farmable each one really is.

Species listed 8

Farm guide

Life cycle, climate, racks and bins, feed, automation, disease, harvest and processing, and licensing.

Chapters 3

The numbers

The business plan, the cost-scaling curve, and a calculator: pick a monthly harvest and a product mix and see if it pays.

Growth stages 8

Recipes

Chapulín tacos, cricket-flour cookies, chile-lime roasted crickets, and dog biscuits. Scalable to your serving count.

Recipes 24

The shop

Live feeders on subscription, roasted crickets, flour, chapulines, pet treats, and frass. Prices are tentative.

Products planned

Why insects

Three reasons to farm them

Feed

Less grain per pound

On a good diet a cricket turns about 1.5–1.9 lb of feed into a pound of body weight, and most of the animal is edible. A feedlot steer needs about 6 lb of feed per pound of gain.

Air

A sliver of the emissions

House crickets put out around 1% of the greenhouse gas that beef cattle do per kilogram gained, and far less ammonia. No methane-burping rumen.

Space

Stacked, not spread

A cricket farm grows up, not out: racks of bins in an insulated room or shipping container. It fits in an industrial unit on the edge of town instead of on a section of pasture.

Honest caveat: those feed numbers only hold on quality feed. Crickets fed raw food scraps or straw mostly died in a UC Davis study. See the scorecard for sources.