These farms have operated for years. The recent twist is just how big some of these farms have grown. As Confucius famously opined, "A million roaches isn't scary. You know what's scary? A billion." Which is how many bugs run around the largest of these farms. These roaches don't all go toward not-really-healing the sick, though. A lot of them are ground up into animal feed. Chinese law says you cannot feed food waste from restaurants directly to animals raised for meat (doing so could lead to some kind of pandemic, supposedly), so farmers found a loophole by feeding this waste to bugs and then feeding the bugs to tastier livestock.Â
The mere fact that insects are being bred on an industrial scale should not scare you. We've previously told you about how America breeds a carnivorous fly as part of a successful scheme to fight that very fly species. However, those flies are radiated into infertility and are purposely raised to be released. If a swarm of cockroaches unexpectedly break out of a farm, on the other hand, that could be worse ... as we know, because it's happened before. Not at the largest farms, but bugs escaped one farm in 2013, and a million roaches overran fields of crops, forcing the government to send in disinfection squads.Â
That breakout happened because some random vandal broke the farm's greenhouses. Not all of these farms are exactly high-tech, you see—you don't need much tech to get roaches to breed. One giant cockroach farm takes the precaution of surrounding the whole complex with a moat filled with trout that eat roaches, but not all megafarms take that precautions, and scientists warn of the risks of a billion roaches breaking out. The question really isn't if these roaches will run loose one day. It's once they do, will we on the outside ever hear about it before the Chinese government and/or the tidal wave of cockroaches silences everyone in a 50-mile radius?