Ask any foodie worth her salt what the next big thing in food will be, and she might tell you it’s something small: insects. Long used as a food source in other cultures, insects are now coming into vogue in the United States among diners who are at once environmentally conscious and adventurous.
Currently, the meat industry produces 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). It is also a major user of water.
According to a recent FAO report, in the United States, it takes 22 pounds of feed to produce a single pound of beef, whereas one pound of crickets requires as little as 3.7 pounds of feed and only about a gallon of water. What’s more, the amount of land needed to grow conventional livestock far outweighs that required for insects, which are generally grown indoors and can easily be produced in cities, close to transportation infrastructure.
What’s not sustainable about insect farming today, however, is the cost. For example, to make insect protein versatile and usable in a range of recipes, some companies are selling cricket flour. At $20 for a one-pound bag, bug flour is unlikely to ever cross the economic divide, even if it crosses a social one. But Tiny Farms, an Oakland, Calif.-based startup, is using IoT technology to innovate and scale up bug farming in order to boost efficiencies and lower costs.
Daniel Imrie-Situnayake, Tiny Farms’ CEO and co-founder, is using his background in programming, sensor networks and data security to marry technology with industrial insect production. Tiny Farms is still in startup mode, but Imrie-Situnayake plans to grow the company through a contract agriculture model, whereby insect growers enter into a contractual agreement with Tiny Farms to sell their product to the company at a set price, in exchange for receiving help from Tiny Farms in establishing and expanding their insect-growing operation.
“We’re acting as the hub for a network of producers,” Imrie-Situnayake says. Tiny Farms provides its contract growers with a set of sensors that are placed inside the manufactured cricket habitats in which the insects are grown. Tracking variables such as temperature and humidity allows the farmers to closely monitor the habitats and ensure that the environment is conducive to high output. But Tiny Farm’s larger goal is to leverage this visibility to improve the operations and yields at all of its contracted farms, in order to increase productivity across the entire network of farmers.
“The idea is that we produce a certain volume [of insect food] here at our own facility, but the majority of the output is produced by other insect farms [that contract with us]. We lose some margin, but gain in terms of lower capital spending and resilience to price shocks,” Imrie-Situnayake explains. “And we’re trying to use data collection and aggregation to drive everything we do. We are learning from the successes and failures across the network, and we can try new things and make sure they’re really improvements before we roll them out across the network.”
Those “new things” might involve changing feedstocks, or making adjustments to the design of environmental conditions within the insect habitats. By running experiments with its contract growers and analyzing the results, Tiny Farms can make system-wide changes based on empirical evidence showing which changes lead to improved yields and which do not.
But Imrie-Situnayake says a key to the Tiny Farm model’s success—especially now, during its early stages—is access to affordable and modular sensor devices that the company can customize to suit its needs. For these, it turns to another startup, Technical Machine, headquartered just down the road, in Berkeley. Technical Machine’s inaugural device is a hardware platform called Tessel, which consists of a circuit board with a microcontroller that runs JavaScript and has an integrated Wi-Fi radio. Technical Machine also sells a range of Tessel sensor modules—humidity and temperature, ambient light and sound, accelerometer, Bluetooth radio and 13.56 MHz RFID reader—that can be plugged into one of the four 10-pin ports on the board. The Tessel board is powered through micro-USB to an external battery or power source.
Last week, Technical Machine announced Tessel 2, which is estimated to begin shipping in August 2015, replacing the earlier Tessel model. The Tessel 2 also has four ports for sensors: two Tessel 10-pin module ports and two USB ports. In addition to the micro-USB, it also sports an Ethernet port, which can be used for Power-over-Ethernet or simply to link the device to a network via Ethernet.
Technical Machine’s target customers are comfortable with software programming, says Jon McKay, one of the company’s co-founders, but are unfamiliar with designing or implementing their own hardware solutions. “Pretty much all of our customers are in—or entering—the IoT space,” he states.
“Tessel is malleable,” Imrie-Situnayake says, “so you can create a piece of hardware that is able to capture data, but you’re not restricted in terms of hardware or software, and it’s really easy to make changes.”
Tiny Farms is using a range of sensors to determine the impact of environmental factors—not only of temperature and humidity, but also light and sound, as well as the levels of various gasses in the air—on the health and reproductive cycles of the crickets it farms at its laboratory. The Tessel board transmits the sensors’ data to Tiny Farm’s cloud-based servers via a Wi-Fi connection. Tiny Farms’ contract farmers can then tap into this data and monitor the Tessel sensor boards installed in their cricket habitats, looking for spikes that could indicate a problem with, say, temperature or humidity, that should be addressed right away.
But Tiny Farms also collects the information in order to identify long-term trends and track production, or to determine how a change in the way a contract farmer raises the insects might or might not impact yields. “For long-term analytics,” Imrie-Situnayake notes, “we’re using aggregated data to look for impacts, such as those of a new seed formula on colony health.”
Tiny Farms is still evolving, Imrie-Situnayake adds, and so will the technology architecture that it will use going forward. For now, the firm accesses the sensor data via the Tessel board’s Wi-Fi radio, but in the long term, it might opt to leverage the Power-over-Ethernet capabilities of Technical Machine’s second-generation board, the Tessel 2, to address both communication and power.
Technical Machine announced the Tessel 2 last week. McKay says this new platform—which is expected to be available in August—was built in response to feedback that the company received from Tessel users. “It’s more robust, supports the Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) protocol, and has better JavaScript compatibility to use more existing libraries,” he says. “We want Tessel 2 to be a base station for the IoT. It’s a reliable way to route data into and from a network.”
The focus for Tessel 2, McKay reports, is to help users scale up the product or business for which they have been using the first iteration of the Tessel hardware. To that end, Technical Machine is also making Tessel 2 available in three special tiers: Prototype, Pilot and Product Tier.
The Prototype version is sold in quantities of 99 or 100 units, for $35 (or less) apiece, and a customer can elect to request that specific components or ports not be included if that end user does not intend to use them. The Pilot Tier is available to customers buying between 100 and 999 units. It includes the same features and options as the Prototype Tier, but customers can also request that operating software come pre-installed on each Tessel 2 board, and can try out this custom configuration on 10 test boards before placing the full order. In addition, McKay says, they can have sensor modules integrated into the Tessel 2 board, thereby removing any potential connectivity problems from sensors “wiggling” in the 10-pin ports, while making the device more compact and giving it a cleaner look—all for a unit cost of $32 or less.
Finally, for the Product Tier, customers must purchase between 1,000 and 10,000 units. This tier offers all of the features and options of the lower tiers, but also includes field support. What’s more, a Product Tier customer can integrate third-party modules into the board, and can have Technical Machine embed the complete Tessel 2 unit (board and sensors) into a housing, as well as place a label with that customer’s logo or branding on each complete unit. The unit price for this level, McKay says, is $30 or less.