Apr 23, 2024
Story and photos submitted by Asher Norman ’26
Gym-N-Eats Cricket is a small family owned cricket farm, where crickets are raised and processed. The cricket farm has all kinds of flavors of crickets such as smokey BBQ, dill pickle, fiesta, buffalo ranch, hot and spicy, and sea salt and pepper.
My eighth grade Agriculture class and I went to Gym-N-Eats Crickets located in Ames, IA. The reason we toured Gym-N-Eats is since we were learning about survival skills and so we would be able to survive off crickets if we needed to. We learned that they kill the crickets in a freezer before processing. Also to have properly raised crickets you need them in a comfortable habitat which contains 87 degrees fahrenheit. There are three thousand to five thousand whole crickets in a pound. Each female cricket lays 5-10 eggs per day. Cricket eggs take eleven days to completely incubate the eggs.
Gym-N-Eats Crickets has roughly a couple hundred thousand crickets in her facility right now. Crickets are fed high quality food with meat in it. If crickets don’t have meat in their diet they are cannibals so they will eat each other. Frass is cricket poop that is used for a plant fertilizer or soil amendment, thereby contributing to closing nutrient cycles and improving soil and plant quality.
Therefore if you didn’t know anything about crickets or raising them I hope you learned something. Gym-N-Eats Crickets farm has their own website that contains their crickets and other goodies. If you have never eaten a cricket before I highly recommend it since they are highly nutritious and affordable, crickets are a good source of protein, fat, vitamins, minerals, and fiber and may benefit gut health. So I definitely recommend giving crickets and Gym-N-Eats Crickets a try!