Now that the height of summer fishing season is here, lots of us will stop by a local bait shop or gas station to scoop up fifty live crickets without giving much thought to how they got there. But if you’re fishing within a hundred miles of Baton Rouge, there’s a high probability that those crickets started their lives at Fluker Farms, the Port Allen-based family business that has been keeping South Louisiana’s bream biting since 1953. Although Richard Fluker founded his farm with the simple intention of supplying fishing bait to local shops, sixty years later, his sons preside over a teeming empire that sells more than five million crickets a week and has become a prominent breeder of feeder insects for the pet-store industry.
“The thing about crickets for bait … it’s pretty much seasonal,” noted David Fluker, who took over the business from his dad in the early ‘80s. “It’s good from spring until July 4; but as soon as school kicks in, it’s pretty much over. But I noticed that we were starting to sell crickets to pet shops.” Since there’s nothing seasonal about the appetite of a pet frog or iguana, the family expanded into raising crickets and other “feeder” insects to supply zoos, pet stores, and the online market. “These days fishing accounts for less than five percent of our volume,” noted Fluker, which means there must be a lot of fat, happy pet frogs devouring the difference.
Fluker Farms does a roaring trade in products like packaged feeds formulated for turtles, tortoises, and lizards; freeze-dried crickets for birds; mealworms; fruit flies for pet frogs; and various other many-legged delicacies—something for every taste. Almost. Sadly the chocolate-covered crickets that made Fluker Farms briefly famous are no longer available, because the supplier they were working with fell on hard times. “We sold about thirty thousand a year, but it got us a lot of attention,” Fluker said, noting that the hardest thing about the chocolate crickets had been finding a candy company willing to take the project on. “I called one local company and told them what I wanted to do and they said, ‘Do you know what we spend trying to keep bugs out of this place?’” Tell that to the eight thousand customers who bought one of Fluker’s Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches ($1.75 apiece) last year. Clearly, once you find your tribe, and feed them right, they’ll keep coming back for more. flukerfarms.com.
