Wake Up With A Giant Chinese Cockroach Farm

Top o' the mornin' to ya! If this is your Barstool 'Wake Up With' blog of the day I'm sorry but you deserve this.

From journalist Bill Birtles of ABC Australia: 

....deep inside a cavernous setup of tight corridors and shelves, I'm standing in the dark, sweating profusely as the rain-like sound of millions of cockroaches eating fills the silence.

It's a peaceful ambience that would go well on one of those calming sleep apps.

Everything else about the situation would probably keep people awake.

Around me on walls, the ceiling and floors, cockroaches large and small scurry about, scattering whenever my cameraman Steve Wang points his camera light at them.

This is a roach nest on a massive scale: four industrial-size hangars packed with rows and an elaborate pipe system that pumps food waste collected from restaurants onto the shelves for the roaches to eat.

According to Birtles there's about 1 BILLION cockroaches on the premises. And what keeps them in this murky, moist, creepy-crawly maze? A large moat like a medieval castle would have, and this moat is full of giant, hungry fish with a taste for cockroaches. 

As for what the roaches themselves eat - a delectable 100,000lbs (50 tons) of kitchen waste from local establishments, every day. And keeping 35,500,000lbs of waste out of your dumps each year sounds great (if you don't mind eternal nightmares). 

Speaking of - the roaches are farmed to be ground up into a nutrient-rich mix & put in medicines and makeups, fed to animals, or used in organic fertilizers, so eventually everyone ends up ingesting a lil' bit of 'em. MmmMmm!

Sitting here thinking about how much you'd have to pay me to spend the night deep inside one of these cockroach farms (there's over 100 around China now, they're pretty lucrative, and other countries are looking to get in on the biz) with just a sleeping bag, and it's at least $500K. I would just seal myself up in the sleeping bag beforehand with a snorkel with some mesh over the hole, pop in earplugs and then hop to my spot in the bag. Duh.

If you want to learn more & lose your appetite check out Birtles' video below. The sound of a billion roaches is hard to get out of your mind.