The fish bait service his grandfather started in 1947 is now an international business, but its cheerful proprietor is never too busy to “talk Tech.”
Title: Owner, Armstrong Cricket Farms
Resides in: West Monroe
Degree: Civil Engineering, ’74
How many crickets are on the property at any one time: “70 million, give or take. And in seven different sizes too!”
Is it always loud? “In a couple of the buildings, it can be, for sure.”
Who counts the crickets? “We have different size shipping boxes for each size cricket we sell. We measure the crickets by volume and pack 1000 crickets per box. The average size box for crickets shipped in the US is 10"x10"x4" and the average size box for crickets shipped outside US is 12"x12"x4". A retail store may only buy 4,000 crickets while a large distribution center may have 500,000 crickets shipped per order. The truck we loaded earlier this week going to California had 4 million crickets which was 4,000 boxes of crickets. We strapped 10 boxes of 1000/box into bundles to make it easy to handle that many crickets.”
The cricket business must be dicey; that’s a lot of animals: “With the cricket industry, you’re dealing with a live thing. You’ve got weather conditions, feed problems, any number of things. Tech taught me how to work situations out. Our professors stressed we couldn’t leave any stone unturned. It’s a lot of little things. Ten million of these crickets are born each week and 10 million are shipped to Canada, Europe, South Africa. We ship to every state in the union except Hawaii; they still have a cricket ban…When I started, our business was 95 percent for fish bait. Now it’s 95 percent animal food and five percent fish bait.”
Talk a minute about how Tech engineering helped you: “Louisiana Tech engineering teaches you to solve problems. Tech teaches its engineers not to give up. We were taught to have safety factors for everything we designed, too…My brother Jimmy runs the tackle part of the business. Jeff (business administration, ’79) runs a smaller farm in Georgia. He knows how to run the business, and I know how to produce the product. Our big expertise is shipping these crickets to large distribution centers. When the business started changing, it lit a fire under me. Tech engineering and not forgetting how to work seven days a week solved the problem.”
It’s got to be difficult to figure out how to ship so many and keep them alive: “Figuring out how to ship five million small crickets on a truck across the country is different than figuring out how to ship two million big ones on an airplane to Europe, once you factor in air conditioning, food, and other shipping conditions. Everything’s got to be alive. Shipping to Winnipeg, for instance, is a challenge in the wintertime. Anchorage isn’t real easy either.”
You told me the crickets are often shipped with tiny heat packs, the same heat packs Tech football players have put in their socks or held in their hands during on-the-road cold weather games: “When I found out those things might help, I let Tech know that I had the largest stockpile of heat packs over here than they could find in a five-state area. If I find out there’s something I can help with at Tech, I try to give them a call and get involved.”
If your friends know of a high school senior who’s thinking about college, you’re often a guy they get in touch with to contact the student: “You can’t help but be impressed with Louisiana Tech. The hands-on learning the professors gave us…the way they taught us how to study and look at things from every angle. Just look at how good the whole University is and where our focus is, how much research we’re drawing. I know I made the right choice in schools. You get a lot more there than you get at other schools where you might get lost. Whether it’s athletics or academics, none of us should miss a chance to talk about all the positive things and all the new things we have going on.”
