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I can attest that escamoles are indeed quite good. They can be found at a lot of trendier restaurants in Mexico City. As someone who also has an interest in permaculture, I'm interested in your idea. All practicalities aside, I think the largest hurdle would be developing new markets. As it stands, I believe escamoles aren't that popular outside of Central Mexico.

Edit: Wanted to add that for a while I've toyed with the idea of using BSF larvae to feed trout in an aquaculture/aquaponics system. The biggest issue for me is that trout require a much lower stocking density than most other fish suitable for aquaculture. I'm just not into tilapia.

I would be really interested in trying out escamoles! and the idea of a business around that sounds quite appealing (even though, yes I imagine it would be hard to convince the average red-meat fed american).

Any idea where to find this delicacy in California?

> [Escamoles] sell for $40-100 per kg

> what really stuck out to me was the opportunity for feeding farmed fish. Farmed fish need protein to grow (duh) and the protein they are fed is generally fishmeal made up of smaller "worthless" fish caught by commercial fishing vessels.

> Fishmeal fetches a price between $1500 and $2000 per metric ton [2], so there is a market for a viable replacement.

You want to replace $2,000 / ton fishmeal with $100,000 / ton escamoles? How are you planning to convince anyone to do that?

> You want to replace $2,000 / ton fishmeal with $100,000 / ton escamoles? How are you planning to convince anyone to do that?

You make 2 assumptions here that don't really make sense in context of the comment:

1) That escamoles are 1:1 replaceable with fishmeal in terms of feeding fish.

2) That the price of escamoles would not go down if industrially farmed

> Chickens are an obvious option

Chicken are fed with soybeans. What would you feed ants so you can feed them to chicken in turn that would be more efficient?

The fish aspect seems more reasonable, if we can't figure out how to feed farmed fish with plant products.

> What would you feed ants...?

Garbage.

What do they eat? Only the highest quality pre-consumer food waste will do. Rather than using animal by-products, we link up with juice bars, bakeries, breweries, and the likes to divert their food waste. While a mushy banana may not seem appetizing to you, our grubs would happily do the honors.

https://grubblyfarms.com/pages/faq

And it's not possible to feed it to the chicken directly or mixing it into their soy feed?

You can feed chickens most food scraps, but some stuff harms them. Avocado and potato peels are toxic. They tolerate less salt than humans, so too much canned food causes trouble. Anything that's started fermenting (as any sugary food left out will) will contain alcohol which they don't tolerate well.

It totally is. Chickens will happily eat anything. Especially other chickens.

I grew up on a chicken and sheep farm. Between letting the chickens roam the vegetable part of the farm area and eat bugs (bonus: we didn't need pesticides) and feeding them our organic food waste, we basically spent nothing on chicken feed. I found out about chickens being zealous cannibals accidentally when I was a kid taking the trash out to feed them. We'd had fried chicken for dinner, and I wasn't thinking about it and just threw all the bones into the feeder like I always did with the food trash. They went berserk over those chicken bones. They absolutely loved them. It was a shark-style feeding frenzy. I was weirded out by that for a while.

It was a pretty small operation though. OP's idea for chickens might make sense in a factory farm situation where there's no space to let them roam for bugs. And maybe the logistics of getting them fresh trash don't make a ton of sense.

I would say it is not allowed to feed them trash when you want to sell their flesh:)

Fresh trash really isn't problematic. It was the food scraps we just finished eating and we would feed it to them as soon as we got done with dinner. It didn't sit around in a bin for days to rot or anything. But yeah, if we had been a regulated operation that probably wouldn't have been okay.

We used the chickens for eggs mostly and meat when they stopped laying. We used the sheep for meat every spring. We would trade with the neighbors in exchange for helping farm our vegetable crops or fresh milk from the small-ish dairy farm down the road. It wasn't the kind of thing where we were selling to a grocery conglomerate or anything.

Probably none of our farming practices would have been acceptable at scale. But that wasn't our point. It was mostly just for our family. Honestly, not the worst way to grow up. You farm your own food and slaughter your own meat. You learn a certain respect and appreciation for what sustains you.

But anyway, yeah, I don't know what the rules are if you're selling your livestock. Feeding them trash probably isn't allowed, even though it's efficient.

> Only the highest quality pre-consumer food waste will do.

...why? I guarantee the ants don't care about this.

Because each step in the food chain tends to concentrate any substance that bioaccumulates. One example is vitamin A. Fish have lots of it in their livers, seals eat fish, polar bears eat seals. Polar bears have so much vitamin A that eating the liver of a polar bear is almost certainly going to be fatal.

So if your food waste contains heavy metals (as another example) and you feed that to the ant larva and in turn feed the ant larva to fish, you're likely to end up with fish that have high levels of heavy metals.

What bioaccumulation occurs between pre-consumer food and post-consumer food? It's the same -- already dead -- substance.

Are you worried about chicken bones getting thrown away along with lead and mercury, and picking those metals up before being fed to the ants?

Insect diet is healthier for chickens than soy. Industrial grain products were not available to the wild chicken.

That's a lot of work and a strong opinion for having never tried it, lol.

It's what I'd expect from an experienced entrepreneur to do: sense an opportunity, investigate market deeply, and make an impassioned decision about starting a venture or not, if the business model makes sense & they'd be ideally positioned to make a run for it.

(edit) gender neutral

By try it, I meant actually try the food. I'd expect a experience entrepreneur to know the details of the product, e.g. taste, mouthfeel etc.