Imagine telling your family of proud cattle producers that you are going to farm insects.
But for fourth-generation farmer Ryan Steppler, his idea for a side business raising crickets for food wasn’t that hard of a sell to his dad, Dale. In fact, it was Dale who first gave him the idea.
Ag-related or not, many side hustles are successful. But to achieve that level of success farmers must be willing to think differently, put a lot of hours into developing their idea and business, and into selling their product or service.
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“I didn’t know anything about raising crickets, but when I did some searching, I found out that crickets are super nutritious and sustainable, so I decided to see what could happen,” says Ryan.
Starting with 200 crickets in 2016 (kept in hydroponic tents in his basement), Ryan’s business, Prairie Cricket Farms, has grown into a 2,320-square-foot custom-built barn with processing and packaging areas. The millions of crickets raised annually are turned into high-protein cricket powder, roasted cricket snacks and chocolate covered cricket clusters.
Not that Dale didn’t think at first that crickets was a bit bonkers, but when Ryan decided to run with it, he got behind him.
“We supported him, and helped out a little bit, and thought, why not? It’s not like we’re technically in competition. There’s room for all,” Dale says.
The Steppler family has always embraced the idea of diversifying into ventures that provide the family farm with additional income streams not just for today, but with an eye to its future sustainability.
- READ MORE: 13 steps to a side hustle on the farm
Their 1,200-acre farm near Miami, Man., is mainly grain with a 45-head cow-calf operation. Ryan, his parents and two brothers are all involved in the operation, but they know that the farm’s land base is not enough to support everyone.
“Land is expensive, so in order to expand, you can’t just go out and buy the neighbour’s farm anymore,” Dale says. “So, we’ve encouraged our sons to do whatever they want to do.”
Ryan’s venture into cricket production is just the latest chapter of the family’s diversification journey.
The learning curve
Prior to coming back to the farm 10 years ago, Ryan was a teacher and lent a helping hand during busy times on the farm. But when his brother, who had been farming alongside Dale, left for the Yukon, Ryan decided to jump back into grain farming on the land that his brother had been renting. That was only a couple of years before he ventured into cricket farming, and he admits he didn’t know much about running a business or marketing.
“I had to learn the business side of the cricket farm, keep books and all that stuff, but I would say my biggest weakness is the marketing aspect of it all,” Ryan says. “It’s different than a farm business because if I have an extra 200 tons of canola, I can sell it tomorrow. But with crickets I had to create a market. It’s developing but it takes a lot of education to get consumers to try it. It takes a lot of time and is a different way to market.”
As a new product in the Manitoba market, Ryan says that government representatives didn’t have many answers to his start-up questions, but they connected him with resources like the Food Development Centre at Portage la Prairie.
“Having to do the nutritional analysis and getting shelf-life studies done, the Food Development Centre was a great help with all that,” Ryan says. “Once you do it a couple of times it gets easier, but these things took a long time before because I didn’t know what I was doing. I made some mistakes.”
Developing a system
Cricket farming involves a sustainable production model with virtually no waste. Even the manure is sold to market gardeners and other businesses as a dry fertilizer. Ryan says the actual farming of crickets was the easiest part to learn. After a lot of research, he connected with a cricket farmer in the U.S. who walked him through the basics of production. He’s since refined his own system largely through trial and error.
“I raise crickets a lot different now just from lessons learned along the way,” Ryan says. “There wasn’t a lot of assistance from other cricket farmers when I started because there weren’t that many, and it was all a little hush-hush at the start. Now I talk with other cricket farmers in Canada, and we run ideas by each other.”
The crickets are housed in 8’ x 4’ beds in a controlled environment heated by a wood burning boiler that maintains temperatures around 33 C – 35 C. Ryan provides them with feed and water until they are harvested at around 35 days. Meanwhile, the crickets lay eggs that are incubated, and the cycle begins again. Once harvested, the crickets are boiled and then dehydrated and either milled into a fine protein powder or roasted into snacks.
“We have a commercial kitchen on the farm where we process and package our products,” Ryan says. “The biggest product for us is the powder because it can go into anything as a protein supplement. As of right now, we’re mostly selling into retail, but my goal is to become an ingredient supplier to other food manufacturers.”
Educating consumers
Crickets have a lot of nutritional benefits. Half a tablespoon provides 12 grams of protein, all nine essential amino acids, 56 per cent of a person’s daily vitamin B12 requirement, and includes prebiotic fibre to maintain gut health. Despite this, it’s still hard to get people to try them.
“Cricket farming is something totally new. We are pioneering something,” Ryan says. “The biggest thing is educating consumers on why eat crickets. First of all, you’re getting someone to eat an insect, so there’s a wall there. But when they do try them, it’s not what they had expected, and they eventually get on board. But it takes multiple times of them seeing it or trying it before they realize it’s something they can add to their diet.”
Ryan has taken sales and marketing courses but says that sometimes it’s the less definable skills picked up through his career and life experiences that have been the most useful.
“Managing a classroom and working with other school staff teaches you a lot of good skills when it comes to managing your own business,” he says. “I also played sports so that developed my leadership skills.”
And he admits that he couldn’t have done it without the support of his parents and brothers and is grateful that they have always been open to new ideas.
Ryan’s advice for farmers thinking about diversifying into a side business is to make sure they take a measured approach and always have a fallback.
“I think it’s important to have some risk management in place. You don’t necessarily need a plan B, you could go all-in with that one thing, but I couldn’t quit teaching the first year I got into crickets even though it would have went further, faster, if I had. But if the crickets bomb some day, I still have a teaching degree and a grain farm.”
One thing leads to another
Growing up on the family farm, Eric Gray learned about entrepreneurship from his dad, Richard, at an early age.
Raising and selling turkeys for some extra cash, Eric quickly learned that he could be more successful if he just concentrated on marketing the birds, so he got someone else to produce them for him.
“It was certainly in part about diversification, just as a strategy in life to have other things you can do,” says Richard, a professor of agricultural economics at the University of Saskatchewan. “It taught him that you don’t have to work for someone, you can work for yourself.”
But it was also about personal development. “You learn so much from developing and working in a business that you don’t get if you are a salaried employee,” Richard says. “It’s a whole different perspective.”
After graduating high school, Eric didn’t go back to the farm right away. Instead, he headed off to college and became a journeyman agricultural mechanic, worked at an equipment dealership for a while and did a stint custom spraying. When he decided to return to the farm 16 years ago, he saw the opportunity to start his own custom spraying business on the side. Today he sprays around 50,000 acres a year.
Armed with his spraying experience, a couple years later the idea for a new product began percolating in his head. He got together with his dad, and they designed and built their prototype FenderXtender, a fender extension for sprayers that reduces mud buildup on tires in wet field conditions.
At the time sprayers didn’t even come with wide fenders. After scraping the mud off the sprayer with a scoop shovel during two extremely wet years, Eric realized that creating an extra-wide fender by attaching the extension to the existing fender would solve the problem.
“It was something that wasn’t out there, and that I needed for myself, so that’s how I got into it,” Eric says.
After testing it on their own operation, they saw a business opportunity but weren’t sure what to do next. How would they produce and sell it? For advice they turned to a neighbour and longtime friend, Jim Halford (original founder of Conserva Pak).
“We asked Jim ‘What are our next steps?’” Richard says. “He said, ‘The first thing you need is a non-disclosure agreement, and I know someone who can help you get a patent’, so that connection was really important.”
Marketing is the hardest part
The biggest hurdle for Eric has been learning how to market and scale up the product. Once again, it was the connections Richard built working in the ag industry and academia that proved valuable in finding advice, resources and potential customers. Eric’s outgoing and gregarious nature helps a lot too and is arguably one of the most essential attributes to running a successful side business that doesn’t have an already established market.
“My role at FendX is a lot bigger now than it was 10 years ago because of the people I’ve met through my business, so that always helps with marketing,” Eric says.
Early on, marketing was a family effort. Richard and his wife, Joan, helped Eric at trade shows to get the product off the ground which, Eric admits, would not have happened without his parents help.
“In the early stages Dad spent hours on his computer doing drawings and was very involved with getting the original design idea,” he says. “Without his support I’m not sure I would have even found the time to do it myself. To this day, my mother does all the accounting for the business, and without her, I wouldn’t have the time to support the business.”
Both Eric and Richard are proponents of doing as much of the business development and marketing as possible in-house, of not being afraid to learn new things and have some fun along the way. For example, when it came time to make a marketing video for the product, they were advised that the best approach was to do it themselves. Something authentic and not too professional would make it more “legit” and resonate better with people interested in the product. So that’s what they did.
Today, their FendX business has outgrown the on-farm shop. The product is fabricated off site and sold largely through a network of dealers across Canada and the United States.
Other benefits
Eric and Richard’s side business provides enough work that they’ve hired some much-needed help.
“The size of the farm is tricky because with the farming and the spraying, it’s too much work for my dad and I to handle but it was going to be tough to keep another employee on year-round with just the farm. This was a great way to be able to justify having another person working with us and helping on the farm,” Eric says.
With multiple enterprises to keep an eye on, Eric has a lot to manage. He knows that to be successful requires the ability to troubleshoot and to know your costs, no matter what type of business or sector.
“I have learned a lot about troubleshooting issues as they arrive, whether it’s the product or our supply chain,” he says. “It’s always good to know your costs because it exposes a lot of things. As an example, the cost of farm equipment has gone up by about 60 per cent in the last five years. They say it’s manufacturing costs, but when you know how much the raw materials cost, you know they’ve not gone up by that much. It’s opened my eyes to a lot of things.”
FendX sales have helped the farm to diversify and build more financial security, an aspect that’s pivotal to their future vision for the farm as Eric and wife, Randi, consider the next generation of ag entrepreneurs: Kylie (13), Kalla (12) and Paxtyn (10).
“Having extra sources of revenue takes a lot of the stress out of farming because farming is a gamble from one year to the next,” he says. “Having multiple businesses and income streams means that any one of our kids can take over any one of them if they want, so it’s providing more options to them as they get older.”
Want to start a side hustle? Follow the advice of people who have done it
Go for it but don’t bet the farm
“If you try something and it doesn’t work out, you can try something else. There’s nothing wrong with that. I believe that not trying is a failure,” says Ryan Steppler, owner of Prairie Cricket Farms in Miami, Man. “That said, it’s not a good idea to give up what you have and go all in with something because that can be very scary.”
Don’t set anything in stone
It’s important to go into any business venture well prepared, but don’t be too intractable. Adjustments will be necessary to overcome obstacles and to seize new opportunities that aren’t always apparent at the outset.
“I had this naïve thinking that I would raise crickets and somebody would just come and buy the frozen crickets from me. Well, that never happened. I had to change my plan,” Steppler says. “I started raising crickets to provide a healthy, sustainable product for people, and along that path, I realized that there was another market for live crickets in pet food stores. I didn’t realize that market existed.”
Be mindful of the time it takes
“It takes a lot of time to create something,” says Eric Gray, who runs FenderXtender, a manufacturing company that produces fender extensions for sprayers. “Be realistic because it’s going to take hundreds of hours for development and marketing.”
Protect your idea
“I see far too often in agriculture people come up with a great idea, make one, throw pictures out there and three months later there’s a company making them and they’ve missed the boat,” Gray says. “Do your due diligence and protect your idea, especially in manufacturing. Make sure you have the patents before you go public.”
Watch your startup costs
“Be careful of your startup costs, how much you invest into it because you’ve got to protect yourself,” Gray says. “If people put hundreds of thousands into a product and it fails, it takes a long time to recover. Don’t be afraid to do things yourself and talk to other people that have done it.”
