Cricket Condo
10,000 Makes Global Challenges Make-a-thon
The 1000 Makes Marathon is a day and a half intensive seminar in which teams of five have 24 hours to design and prototype a solution to the 2016 theme, Grand Challenges. My group addressed energy and resource intensive meat supply. Because cattle require cast amounts of land and water for both livelihood and food supply, the impact that the beef industry has on the environment is insurmountable. With additional protein sources such as chickens and pigs added to the list, the world's meat consumption has a monumental impact on the natural world.
We decided to tackle this problem by suggesting crickets become the main source of human protein. Crickets provide three times the amount of protein by weight than beef and offer calcium, iron, zinc, and magnesium. They require a fraction of the water, land, and feed use of any mammal, and can be used both as whole crickets or ground up into protein powder.
Cricket farming is currently inefficient because of its lack of traction. We have designed a cricket farming system that is space and energy efficient, as well as user friendly; we call them Cricket Condos. The condos consist of multiple cages on rows of shelves, with each shelving unit containing its own climate control unit. Each box's walls are made of screens which allow air to circulate in order to keep the crickets alive. The perforated bottom provides the crickets with a stable platform to stand on, while allowing excretions to fall through the holes and be removed by emptying the drawer underneath.
Handlers will be able to change the food and water by opening the door on the front in between harvests. In order to harvest the crickets for processing, the climate control system drops the temperature in the shelving unit so that the crickets freeze to death to preserve their freshness and prevent pain.
I was the main designer for the Cricket Condo itself, building it with one other person in a six hour time frame. We presented our work along with the other eleven teams and we awarded second place.
