Yellow Springs, Ohio, has been known for its counter-culture vibe since the 1960s, but the day the bug farm arrived its eccentricity rating went up a notch.
Consisting of a few tidy buildings, EnviroFlight sits across from a hip brewpub in an unassuming industrial park. It houses millions of bugs, but you wouldn’t know it from the outside — or from the inside for that matter. The “production room” is so bright and clean it could be an industrial bakery. But look closely inside one of the dozens of stainless steel vats and you’ll see writhing insect larvae, happily munching on cookie and cracker crumbs.
The larvae are those of the black soldier fly, a native, nonpathogenic insect. The larva’s size increases by 5,000 times in the span of just a few weeks. Their fast growth is key to the operation, but so is their food: mostly pre-consumer waste, aka the scraps from big food manufacturing facilities. Chicken-nugget breading is often on the menu, but sometimes it’s broken cookies or spent grains from the adjacent brewpub — whatever is cheap and available. “They’ll eat anything,” said Glen Courtright, the man at the helm of the operation.