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Comment by DanI-S | Hacker News Reader

I'm one of the founders of Tiny Farms. I think you're probably recalling an article published in PLOS ONE last year that suggested the sustainability of crickets might not meet the hype.

We were obviously very interested in the study! It turns out that the paper missed some crucial factors that make insects a sustainable, efficient protein source.

I guest-wrote this post with some details; do take a look if you're interested.

http://blog.exoprotein.com/crickets-vs-chicken/

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Sooo tl;dr: is that chickens use more water, produce more manure, and tend to be butchered away from the farms, but the study was still correct in it's food to protein conversions being almost the same between poultry and crickets?

I guess I'd summarize the feed conversion part as follows:

- Crickets are slightly better than poultry at converting poultry feed into protein.

- Crickets are great at converting processed grocery store waste into protein; poultry can't do this at all.

- Both species are awful at converting low quality food waste (a mix of chicken poop and straw) into protein.

- The efficient feed conversion of modern poultry comes only after years of research, development and breeding; the efficient feed conversion of insects comes "out of the box" and will only improve over time.

> Both species are awful at converting low quality food waste (a mix of chicken poop and straw) into protein

Wait - what? Do farmers really try to feed their chickens with chicken shit?!

That's pretty much how we got Mad Cow Disease [1]

    A British and Irish inquiry into BSE concluded the 
    epizootic was caused by cattle, which are normally 
    herbivores, being fed the remains of other cattle 
    in the form of meat and bone meal (MBM), which 
    caused the infectious agent to spread

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopat...

They were giving the cows feed that was salted with protein sourced from ground up sheep, of which there were trace amounts of neurological tissue containing the prions.

It's not unusual for farmers to add amino acids as a supplement to feed. It's one of the targets for high-nitrogen (amino acid) GM corn.

Vegetarian protein is also way more efficient than any animal-based protein. Why do we need crickets then? (honestly curious, no criticism)

I guess another factor is space.

For one thing you can go more 3D with crickets, whereas with chickens you would have to build additional levels if you wanted to 'stack' them.

Also, many people care about the welfare of the animals they eat, such as making sure they have space to roam and live some kind of life before they are slaughtered. I doubt anyone will care if you cram crickets in so tight they can barely move. So at least in terms of space, I imagine you're going to need much less land for a cricket farm.

Criticizing a peer-reviewed study is both healthy and welcome, but it really should be done with peer-reviewed studies of one's own. Respectfully, all I see here are extraordinary claims without any evidence, extraordinary or otherwise.

Are we reading the same "critique"? I don't see much in the way of extraordinary claims. In fact, most of the claims come directly from the paper! None of that post was criticizing the paper -- it was primarily clarifying the one sided news coverage.

The study says that crickets are not that much more efficient converters of plants->protein. The "clarification" accepts and applies the information from the study. It then takes into account an understanding of current processes in chicken cultivation to argue that overall impact on the environment would still likely be substantially reduced, especially with better technology.

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