Tiny Farms produces high quality cricket protein for use in pet food, healthy human food, and animal feed using a scalable, highly-modular proprietary farm system. 

Our mission is to address the world’s looming protein shortages, offset the negative environmental impacts of traditional protein production, and transform the economics of cricket farming by deploying high efficiency insect farms -- creating a regional production networks across the country, and eventually the world.

As the world population rapidly approaches the 9 billion mark and concerns around the production and sustainability of animal protein prevail the global discourse, the need for alternative food sources consumed by humans, pets, and other livestock is more important now than ever before. 

Enter: Crickets.

Protein-rich insects such as crickets are an increasingly accepted alternative to traditional animal and fish livestock. Unlike most farm animals, they require a small amount of space and resources to rear and can be raised in urban areas -- translating to a far more manageable environmental footprint than, say, a cow. 

Compared to traditional livestock, cricket farming is significantly more efficient, produces far fewer greenhouse gases, and requires much less feed, water and space to grow.

The challenge? 

Currently insect farming is inefficient and has not achieved scale, so insects are expensive and difficult to source. The total available supply is also relatively small and not reliable enough for insect brands to scale for major retail.

That’s where Tiny Farms comes in. 

Our team has developed a proprietary rearing system for raising and harvesting crickets to address the biggest pain points faced by insect farmers, while providing an affordable, scalable supply of cricket product to promote widespread adoption in pet food and healthy snack products. 



Our crickets are 100% natural, fed exclusively with non-GMO, vegetarian feed, and bred and grown completely indoors in a controlled, food-safe environment. We are also exploring options to upcycle food industry byproducts as feed for the crickets - preventing nutrient waste, reducing environmental footprint, and significantly reducing feed costs. We currently have a two-pronged product output:

Cricket Powder | Processed into a powder by drying and milling whole crickets. The powder is sold as a wholesale ingredient to companies making cricket protein dog treats. 

Frass | The cricket excrement, or frass, is produced as a dry sand-like material and packaged and sold as a natural, ready-to-use fertilizer. 

The Tiny Farms rearing system uses automation and habitat usability design to reduce labor costs by minimizing frequency and duration of human interaction for tasks like harvesting, cleaning, and feeding.

The result is an innovative solution that enables the rapid scaling of production necessary to create a real impact in offsetting the huge global demand for traditional proteins. 

Complete sensor integration & data capture platform for monitoring, analysis, and optimization.

Farm management app to guide and track day-to-day tasks.
 

Lightweight infrastructure can be deployed quickly and affordably in any available enclosed space.

Reduced labor costs.
 

Increased efficiency and utilization of space.

The Tiny Farms team has already made a ton progress in our mission to pave the way for the edible insect movement. 

A prototype version of our farm is complete and operating in our pilot facility, demonstrating the core innovations of our farm system and actively producing product. 

We’ve begun filling orders for our first CPG customer, Jiminy’s Dog Treats, and secured an LOI indicating their desire to acquire everything our pilot farm can produce. We also have relationships with numerous potential customers who are eager for additional supply. 

We’ve partnered with the USDA ARS to develop a proprietary drying method that is faster and more energy efficient than current practices and more cost effective to deploy. 

We have protectable IP in hardware and software and a trade secret rearing system. 

We’ve been featured in numerous renowned publications like The NY Times, Forbes, Entrepreneur, BBC, NBC, The Guardian, The SF Chronicle, Wired, Fortune, and more!

We were selected as 2017 Western Region Winners of the CleanTechOpen accelerator​

The Tiny Farms team has spent the past 5 years raising crickets and perfecting the development of their proprietary rearing system -- bringing to the table a unique cross-disciplinary expertise in the areas of design, system optimization, data, food science and food product development, molecular biology, genomics, and more.