Inside a warehouse in an industrial Van Nuys neighborhood, thousands of mature crickets engage in uninhibited stridulation as their landlords look on.

For some people, the mating calls may symbolize the sound of summer.

But for the owners of Coalo Valley Farms, each chirp is a leap toward the future of sustainable community food systems.

“We wanted to develop a sustainable source of protein and crickets seemed like the perfect way to do so, “ said co-owner and Coalo Valley Farms founder Peter Markoe. “ Over 2 billion people worldwide include insects in their diets and we want Westerners to realize the nutritional and environmental benefits of doing so.

Markoe and co-owner Elliot Mermel founded Coalo Valley Farms a year ago with a goal to become part of the emerging edible insect market. At the time, their Van Nuys business was the first urban cricket farm for edible consumption in California. A large part of the 7,000 square feet of warehouse space is used to cultivate and process food-grade crickets for sale to consumers, restaurants and food manufacturing companies. They achieved a goal this year when the Burbank based Grain Lab Deli & Kitchen reached out to Coalo Valley Farms to create and serve cricket burgers.

Grain Lab chef Flavi Mancera uses the dry roasted whole body crickets _sans legs_ in a patty made of quinoa and tops it with a horseradish aoili. The cricket burger special will be sold until Friday.

“I thought people would say, ew,” said Grain Lab owner Tim Kang, adding that he reached out to Coalo Valley Farms after he read about them. “Instead, a lot of customers see it on the menu and say, ‘hey that’s good a idea, but I’m not ready to try it yet’.”

And that’s fine with Markoe and Mermel who continue to evolve their products to attract the American palate. Along with partner Lucas Haralson, they’ve started making dark chocolate covered crickets and are experimenting with other flavors.

Since they founded the farm, they have improved how they feed and raise the insects. That includes growing their own sprouts in an in-house aquaponics unit, which involves using the waste from live fish to fertilize plants that also filters the fish water. The plants are then fed to the crickets.

“With land and water resources dwindling, advances in sustainable agriculture are necessary,” Markoe added. “Our goal has been to develop an effective method that will help feed the growing world population.”

The team are primarily focused on sales but it does take time.

It takes a little more than two months for a cricket to mature. Crickets like warmer climates, are omnivorous and eat decaying plant material, fungi and some seedling plants. At Coalo Valley Farms, they are raised in hundreds of open modified bins and fed fresh sprouts. Harvesting involves a freezing method, to slowly get the crickets’ heart rates down.

“We like to say they have lived a full life,” Markoe said. “They’ve reproduced. They have had healthy diets. We harvest them humanely.”

There’s been much trial and error too-from learning the best temperatures to breed the crickets to figuring out how to keep them from hoping out.

“We used to have more escapes, but we figured it out with tape,” Markoe said of using slippery tape along the rims of the bins, which crickets don’t like.

“Our crickets are pretty resilient. We use a different species.”

The demand for cricket flour, for example, has been great, Mermel said. Cricket powder is increasingly becoming an ingredient for everything from protein bars and smoothies, to pizza crust and pancakes.

While Westerners still are somewhat squeamish at the thought of eating insects, some of the best-known Oaxacan restaurants in Los Angeles already serve chapulines or grasshoppers in their dishes, for example.

Cricket farms in the United States are not new. Armstrong Crickets opened in 1947 and was the first in the nation to supply pet stores and bait shops. But the first edible cricket farm opened in Ohio in 2014, and more have followed.

A United Nations report released in 2013 promoted the use of insects for human consumption as a way to help sustain a growing population without causing more problems for the environment.

At Coalo Valley Farms, the team is working on raising meal worms, which also are rich in protein.

“They also don’t hop,” joked Mermel. “That’s the biggest benefit. “