FRANKLIN, N.H. (AP) – When a friend offered to lend Carl Jenkins $50,000 for a new business, he considered several ideas: gourmet dog biscuits, baby furniture, a convenience store. His wife suggested a cricket farm.
Six months later, Jenkins is the owner of Crazy Carl’s Cricket Farm, which at any one time is home to between 800,000 and 1 million crickets.
“It was music to my ears when I first heard chirping,” said Jenkins.
The farm is located in the corner of an old mill building. Two dozen 30-gallon bins are stacked on shelves in a dark, warm room. He lifts the lid off one to reveal hundreds of crickets teeming over a stack of foam next to chunks of half eaten potatoes, a scattering of chicken feed and moist gel to keep the crickets watered. Female crickets lay their eggs in a dish of shredded coconut husk.
“Once they lay their eggs, that’s the end of the highway for them,” said Jenkins. “The males probably last longer than the females do. The females do all the work.”
Until last summer, Jenkins managed the supply chain at a General Electric plant. After 23 years, he was exhausted.
“I kept getting more and more burnt out,” he said. “They were taking out a piece of my flesh every day.”
A childhood friend offered to provide him with the startup capital for a new venture. The winning idea came from his wife, who remembered the lizard Jenkins once owned that ate crickets “like popcorn.”
Pet shops often sold out of crickets, Jenkins recalled, and he had to shop for them online. The nearest commercial breeder was in Georgia.
Using $15,000 of his own money as well, Jenkins shipped his first order in November. If his business keeps growing at the current rate, he said, his income will exceed his operating costs by next month.
So far, most of his business is direct to consumers, but he also supplies six pet stores in the area and is negotiating with more. He has an advantage over distant breeders because FedEx ground shipments will arrive anywhere in New England within a day.
Jenkins’s goal is to expand the business to 20 employees. He sells the crickets in eight sizes.
“Right now, I pretty much live here,” he said. “But my day will come.”
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