There’s a new kind of fertilizer about to hit the market and a Petrolia company is instrumental in making it happen.

SureSource Commodities is working with Aspire – a London company growing billions of crickets for food – to create a new source of fertilizer from cricket poop and their exoskeletons.

Rob Wallbridge, the Agronomy Sales Lead at SureSource, says this is the first time a Canadian company scientist could look at the value of using insect poop and exoskeletons – known as frass in the science world – for fertilizer.

“The crickets poop as they’re growing and then they also shed their exoskeleton. The exoskeleton contains a substance called chitin, which has some benefits in terms of plant growth in plant health and so that’s really where our research is kind of focused on, seeing exactly what unique benefits the frass can provide,” says Wallbridge.

The Petrolia company recently received a $199,000 grant as part of the Ontario government’s Fertilizer Challenge to take a look at the possibilities of using cricket waste to improve domestic fertilizer production.

Crickets – like every living creature – produce waste naturally in the wild. Researcher Rhoda deJonge of Vineland Research which is working with SureSource says turning large amounts of it into fertilizer just makes sense.

“Bugs have been doing this forever, it’s just we don’t necessarily appreciate it when it’s something that’s happening in our gardens,” she says. “It’s just harnessing it for a very specific purpose.”

The commercial production of insects has been around for decades however it’s never happened at a large scale in Canada.

“So it hasn’t really been an input that is commercially viable or something that a large scale farmer would even consider” Wallbridge tells The Independent.
But Aspire creates about 15,000 tonnes a year of cricket frass which could be used on upwards of 30,000 acres of land, either on vegetable and fruit crops or in greenhouses, Wallbridge says.

“What’s interesting about what Aspire is doing in London is they’re actually scaling it up to a point where they’re going to be producing significant volumes of the frass. So it actually becomes something that helps, we’re going to have enough of it that it’s going to be of interest to the different growers,” he says.

Wallbridge says there has been some interest from farmers and SureSource hopes to start trials with the fertilizer in Lambton county this spring.

deJonge says SureSource and Vineland Research have been working together on a formulation which produces a fertilizer that breaks down quickly giving plants access to nutrients faster. And “it doesn’t smell to bad” – far better than animal manure although there might be a faint odour if the fertilizer is wet, deJonge adds.