HENRIBOURG, Sask. – Every morning, Bradley Gutka checks his critters and puts out their feed. With a flock of 800,000 to one million head, he’s a busy man.
Gutka is in the cricket business, supplying the chirping insects to people and stores as food for reptiles, birds and fish.
In a small building next to the home where he grew up in north-central Saskatchewan, Gutka keeps two rooms at about 32 C where he raises crickets and meal worms in racks of large rubber tubs.
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“A good cricket is a stress-free cricket. We take a lot of care in our crickets that we grow and make sure they’re healthy, they’re not overcrowded in their bins and they have good quality food,” he said.
Gutka recruits his girlfriend, Jessica Toporowski, to help him gather materials for his operation and feed and water, but she draws the line at handling them.
“At first, I thought it was a pretty bizarre idea,” she said. But she is happy to see Gutka’s hard work paying off for him.
Gutka got the idea for his business, Super Cricket, while teaching English in Thailand. He had a pet fish that ate worms and other live feed, but he had trouble finding crickets for it.
A lifelong pet owner, Gutka had dabbled with raising crickets to feed his assortment of lizards and fish. His experience in Thailand made him think of using the internet to make crickets available to pet owners back home.
He returned to Henribourg and applied his skills as a carpenter to set up his operation, sectioning off his breeding area and building racks.
He also created a website at www.supercricket.ca and imported breeding stock.
Early challenges included a malfunctioning heater that wiped out his first batch. Through trial and error, Gutka has perfected his breeding techniques, and he has now been in business for a year and a half.
He is expanding Super Cricket to meet demand and building a stock of meal worms so he can start selling them.
He is also setting up a pilot program raising nightcrawlers, which he hopes to sell as bait during the upcoming ice fishing season.
