OCTOBER 2019 • COUNTRY LIFE IN BC Chilliwack farms hopping with insects


Protein, berry and honey farmers showcased on annual tour by DAVID SCHMIDT


CHILLIWACK—When none of his six children expressed an interest in continuing the dairy farm his father had begun 50 years earlier, Mark Sprangers of Chilliwack decided to shut down the farm, which had recently installed robotic milkers and become – of all things – a cricket farmer, converting one of his robot rooms into a cricket-rearing facility. A year ago, a serious health issue put a crimp in those plans, halting production for close to a year. This spring, Sprangers encountered three Langley entrepreneurs who had started raising crickets about the same time as he had and were looking for a better alternative to the trailers they were using in Langley.


On July 1, Russell Travis, Ken Chhabra and Robbie Grewal of Green Earth Protein moved into Sprangers’ barn and started an ambitious expansion program. “It was our dream of


providing a sustainable protein,” Travis told participants in the 18th annual Chilliwack Agriculture Tour on September 13, insisting crickets are a much more sustainable way of producing protein than livestock. “Crickets use 90% less land


than cows and produce three times the protein,” he says, with Chhabra adding it takes only a gallon of water to produce a pound of cricket protein, compared to 8,000 litres of water to produce a pound of beef. It also takes only two pounds of feed (a 26% protein turkey-grower mash) to produce a pound of cricket protein. It takes about 5,000


crickets to produce a pound of cricket powder but you can grow a lot of crickets in just a tiny space. A female cricket lays about 600 eggs and crickets can grow to a harvestable size in just seven weeks so it doesn’t take long to produce 5,000 crickets. Travis sees a huge potential market for cricket protein, saying athletes are big consumers. While Green Earth Protein is still in its


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infancy, the partners have ambitious plans. The operation currently uses just 5,000 square feet of space but Travis says the barn offers another 60,000 square feet “we can expand into.” Crickets are killed humanely by freezing them at -4°C, a process which takes about four hours, then ground up and dried in a 30 kilowatt microwave dryer.


Big time bees Insects were featured


throughout the Chilliwack agriculture tour as the second stop was at Klaassen Farms, which relies heavily on bees to pollinate its 100 acres of blueberries. Klaassen grows five varieties of blueberries, from 40-year old Bluecrop bushes to new plantings of Calypso which are still two years from production. “We produced 814,000 pounds of blueberries this year,” Bernadette Maguire said.


About 300,000 pounds


were sold direct to consumers through a u-pick, on-farm market and several roadside stands as well as small retailers in Vancouver, the Fraser Valley and the Okanagan. The rest were shipped to a local processor. Berries sold direct are cleaned, colour-sorted and packaged on farm using small, but state-of-the-art, equipment. Although Klaassen Farms is


not certified organic, Maguire stressed they use organic pesticides such as Entrust to deal with pest and disease issues.


“None of the sprays we use


are harmful to bees,” she says, saying no honeybee provider would come to the farm if


Ken Chhabra stands in front of one of the cricket rearing bins at Green Point Protein, one of four stops on the 18th annual Chilliwack agriculture tour, September 13. DAVID SCHMIDT PHOTO


there was the potential of harm to the bees. “I know of several


blueberry growers who can’t get pollinators because of the sprays they use,” she said. Chilliwack is home to one


of BC’s largest providers of honeybee pollination services: Worker Bee Honey Co., owned by Jerry and Pia Awram and their son Peter. “We started with 300 hives


in Alberta in 1970. We came to Chilliwack in 1983 and now have 7,000 hives in BC and Alberta,” Jerry told the group. The bees are put to work in BC blueberry fields early in the year before moving to


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canola, alfalfa and clover fields in Alberta. They come back to BC in the early fall for overwintering. “Last year, we produced 750,000 pounds of honey,” says Awram. A few years ago, the price of honey dropped by 50 cents a pound after some Canadian honey was found to be adulterated with sucrose and other additives.


That translates to a lot of lost income when you’re at the size of Worker Bee. It prompted Peter to invest in a nuclear magnetic resonance machine, one of only two such machines in North


America.


The NMR analyzes the chemical composition of honey, determining not only whether it has been adulterated but where it originated and the crop the honey comes from. “Our objective is to acquire a baseline library of analyses which we can then use to identify individual samples,” Jerry said.


He noted Peter was not at home to address the tour as he was attending the bi-annual Apimondia conference in Montreal, drumming up interest in Worker Bee’s new service.


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