Cricket farming is not what most people think it is
You show up expecting a glamorous agri-tech revolution and you get dust, humidity controllers, and a lot of sieving. I started looking into this space about three years ago when my brother convinced me that cricket protein was the future of sustainable farming. I lasted six months before realizing most of the hype was just marketing wrapping around the same basic principles that have been used in backyard insect farms for decades. The Mycricket platform enters this space as a digital management tool for small to mid-scale cricket operations. It tracks breeding cycles, monitors environmental conditions through connected sensors, and attempts to standardize harvest timing across colonies. It is not magic. It is a dashboard with some automation that cuts down on the spreadsheet work most farmers were doing by hand.
The Revolutionary World Of Mycricket Unlocking The Future Of Cricket Farming
Setting it up took me about forty minutes on my first attempt because the documentation assumes you already know what a PH sensor calibration looks like. You start by connecting the environmental modules. Mycricket supports their own branded sensors but also works with generic ESP32-based setups if you are willing to flash custom firmware. The proprietary hardware is cleaner but costs roughly three times what a DIY sensor would run you. I went with a mix. Two proprietary units for the main breeding chambers and three ESP32 setups for the nursery trays where precision matters less. The core workflow runs on a simple loop. You define your colony parameters, the system sets target temperature and humidity ranges, and the hardware adjusts based on real-time readings. Cricket farming at scale lives or dies on humidity control. Too dry and your eggs do not hatch. Too wet and you get mites. I spent two weeks fighting a mite outbreak on batch four before I realized the sensor in nursery tray three was reading five percent off from the actual environment. The workaround was swapping to a DHT22 sensor and recalibrating it against a calibrated reference unit I bought off Amazon for eighteen dollars. The Mycricket app has a sensor calibration screen but it is buried under three menus and the tooltip text is basically useless. Where Mycricket actually saves time is in the breeding cycle tracking. A full cricket cycle from egg to harvestable adult runs about thirty-five to forty-five days depending on temperature. Managing five or six overlapping generations on paper is a nightmare. The platform flags when each colony hits the harvesting window and sends push notifications. You still do the actual harvesting by hand or with a vacuum setup, but knowing exactly which trays to pull cuts my pre-harvest confusion time from roughly twenty minutes down to maybe three.
There is a feed conversion ratio calculator built into the analytics section. This is the part that most people ignore but it is the number that determines whether you are running a hobby or a business. Crickets convert feed to body mass at a ratio of about two to one, meaning two kilograms of feed produces one kilogram of cricket biomass. Mycricket tracks your feed inputs automatically if you log them daily and compares them against your harvest weights. After three months the data showed my FCR was sitting at 2.3 to one, which meant I was overfeeding by roughly fifteen percent. Adjusting the feeding schedule based on that feedback dropped my monthly feed costs by about eighty dollars without any change in yield. The app also has a disease and pest alert system that uses photo uploads. You take a picture of suspicious behavior or colony decay and the system matches it against a database of common issues. The accuracy is mediocre at best. It correctly identified a fungal outbreak in colony seven on the first try but misdiagnosed a simple overcrowding issue as a pathogen in batch nine, which sent me down a three-day treatment rabbit hole. I stopped relying on it for diagnosis after that and now only use it as a starting point before checking other resources. Another thing nobody talks about is the export and integration side. If you are selling to processors or buyers who require batch traceability, Mycricket can generate PDF reports with colony history, feed logs, and environmental data spanning the entire lifecycle. That alone justified the subscription cost for me. The reports look professional and cover everything a buyer would ask for without you having to assemble anything manually.
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The downsides are real and they are not subtle. The mobile app crashes on older Android devices if you have more than five colonies tracked simultaneously. I have a Samsung Galaxy S10 from 2019 and it freezes every time I open the analytics screen with historical data. The web interface does not have this problem but it is slower and less intuitive. Customer support responds within twenty-four hours on weekdays but their technical answers are copy-pasted from a knowledge base that is about eighteen months out of date. When I reported the Android crash issue they acknowledged it but the fix had not shipped in three months. There is also the matter of data portability. Your farm data lives on Mycricket servers and while they do allow CSV exports, the format changes slightly between app versions. I lost about six weeks of properly formatted data when a v3 update restructured the export fields and my old spreadsheets stopped importing into my accounting software. I keep a local backup now but it adds a step I did not want. The hardware dependency is another bottleneck. If your sensors go offline for more than forty-eight hours, the breeding cycle data becomes unreliable and the system starts throwing warnings about environmental drift. I had a power outage during a heatwave and my ESP32 sensors died within an hour because I had not invested in a battery backup. The proprietary Mycricket units have a small internal battery that kept them reporting for about six hours, which was enough to prevent a total colony loss. Without that backup your entire generation could be stressed before you even noticed.
For people just getting started I would recommend the free tier if you are managing fewer than three colonies. It covers basic tracking and sensor monitoring without forcing you to commit to a paid plan. Once you hit that threshold the Pro tier at twelve dollars a month makes sense because the automated cycle tracking and reporting features start paying for themselves in saved time. The Enterprise tier at forty dollars is overkill unless you are running more than ten colonies and need multi-user access for farm workers. If you are serious about this you will also want a separate humidity logger as a backup. The Mycricket sensors are decent but I have seen too many reports from other farmers about calibration drift after a few months of continuous use. A standalone data logger like the Inkbird model costs about thirty dollars and gives you a second reading you can cross-reference whenever something looks off. Cricket farming itself is not revolutionary. The insects do what they have always done. What Mycricket offers is a layer of organizational structure that most small operators skip at their peril. I would not call it unlocking the future of anything. It is a tool that makes an already difficult process slightly less chaotic. That is worth something but it is not a game-changer.
The people who will get the most out of this are those who already understand cricket biology and just need help with record keeping and scale management. If you are a complete beginner trying to learn cricket farming through the app alone you will hit walls quickly. The software does not teach you how to breed crickets. It only tells you what is happening with the ones you already have.
