(bright upbeat music) - The mine pits specifically are just phenomenal because they're incredibly clear in comparison with normal lakes.

There's a lot of fish life.

They're interesting to see.

If you actually see them in a normal lake, you might see a puffer silt where fish was.

- Barbecued crickets.

That's delicious.

- [Bre] Comes with instructions for the assembly but also a predesigned layout.

(bright upbeat music) - [Announcer] Funding for this program was provided by Safe Basements of Minnesota, your basement, waterproofing and foundation repair specialist since 1990.

Peace of mind is a safe basement.

Live Wide Open, the more people know about West central Minnesota, the more reasons they have to live here.

More at livewideopen.com.

Western Minnesota Prairie Waters where peace, relaxation and opportunities await.

And the members of Pioneer PBS.

(bright upbeat music) - [Bret] When Minnesota's weather turns cold and hostile scuba divers flock to the warmer waters of the Caribbean and Pacific islands.

But this year international travel is being replaced by road trips.

And many people are discovering the thrill of deep water dives in Northern Minnesota's abandoned mine pits.

(bright upbeat music) (bright upbeat music) - The mine pits specifically are just phenomenal because they're incredibly clear in comparison with normal lakes.

There's a lot of fish life that are interesting to see.

You can actually see them in a normal Lake.

You might see a puffer silt where a fish was because they'll sense you coming in and they'll take off.

There's a lot of foundations of buildings and mine shafts and cars and trucks, railroad rails, all sorts of things that were leftover from the mining days too so it's quite interesting.

Lot of really cool walls that you can dive on.

So yeah, it's a popular spot out there.

- [Bret] Minnesota School of Diving owner, Todd Matthies and other experienced divers lead fun dives in mine pits from May through October.

- We've got a lot of the same people.

A lot of same people have been diving with us for 30 years, 20 years.

They've really become family but then there's a lot of people that are coming up for the first time making that transition from their training to actually getting out there and just enjoying themselves.

So we've got these, these mines, both the Cuyuna Range which has the wreck area.

There's also a series of mines up in the Virginia area, The Gilbert then that, Mesabi range.

Some of those are now opening up for diving too.

This place called Ore-be-gone in Gilbert encouraged, diverse actually plant items down there.

I think there's a helicopter in there, there's a school bus, People like to put skeletons down there.

There's little plastic skeletons.

So there's one hanging from a tree and one of the mines with a plastic skeleton of a vulture kind of hanging over their shoulder.

There's another one.

There's a bartender behind a bar, a pirate bartender whatever that's serving up drinks in one of the mines.

There's another pirate in a sailboat.

So the skeletons have become quite popular for people to do that and just put them in different positions.

- [Bret] At least once a summer, Todd leads a great Lake shipwreck tour.

Decades ago, divers stopped bringing up artifacts from these wrecks so that they could remain intact for others to enjoy.

- The shipwrecks, they are phenomenal too because that's all freshwater.

The freshwater preserves the wrecks very well.

There's a few wrecks up there that are actually wooden that sank over a hundred years ago.

There is still, you know pristine, pretty much pristine conditioners, there's still paint on the side of their walls.

- [Bret] Every few years, Todd will also organize a diving trip to the international destinations such as Chuuk Lagoon in the West Pacific where Americans bombed a large Japanese Naval base during world war II.

- [Reporter 1] We hear that it was a complex, heavily fortified-- - 65 Japanese ships sunk there and you can go dive on those.

So some of the wrecks are still army tanks strapped to the deck of the wrecks.

There's airplanes, complete airplanes inside like Japanese zero fighter planes over there.

There's all sorts of live, live coordinates like big 16 inch, 18 inch shells for the Yamato and the Musashi battleships.

So there's all these things are still in these wrecks so.

(bright upbeat music) - [Bret] Todd owns two facilities.

The newest is in St.

Cloud and the original dive school is in Brainerd where his father started the business in 1959.

The schools offer different levels of training and certifications ranging from discover scuba for those who just wanna try it out to the full Patty, open water diver certification course.

Learning to dive in cold water has its advantages.

- Because if you know, you can dive in cold water with all the gear that's required, you can do it in the warm water.

It's much easier.

And then just work on your diving.

Don't try to add a bunch of stuff like don't try carrying a camera, right away.

Just work on becoming a comfortable diver and get that down.

For a lot of people, once they get certified in the cold water and then experience a warm water trip, they never go back in the cold water but I actually liked it.

- [Bret] Because water temperatures dropped from the fifties to the thirties when you're at 60 feet, Curtis switched from a wetsuit to a dry suit.

Wet suits allow a thin layer of water inside the suit whereas a dry suit offers protection from cold water with neck and risk seals, Ludon boots and insulated clothes underneath.

- And that just changes your whole perspective on diving 'cause now you have a perpetual dive season.

You can dive all through winter if you want.

Cut a hole in the ice and jump in and go.

The great lakes became a possibility.

They never warm up.

You're always in cold, near freezing water.

So started doing shipwrecks and started exploring some of the deeper pits here in Cuyuna and saw some stuff that you can't see unless you're willing to go deeper.

(bright upbeat music) - [Bret] To see the Friday the 13th Jason Voorhees made by Curtis's friend, Doug requires diving down 115 feet to the bottom of the Louise pit.

- [Curtis] And we found a lot of people inquiring about, I wanna get to Jason Voorhees so we have to be pretty concerned about what their experience level is because it's not an easy dive going to 115 so.

- [Bret] Some stuff is plunged into the water to cover up a crime like guns and cars.

- [Curtis] Myself and most of my staff are members of the Cloud County dive rescue squad.

So when we see any new vehicle that's in there, obviously we're concerned about the oil, the gasoline any kind of contamination.

We report it, try to get a VIN number, serial or a license plate number to report it.

And usually those items are pulled out.

- [Bret] A volunteer dive squads mission can be heartbreaking when the search is for a drowning victim.

- What motivates us as divers for that squad is trying to understand or empathize with the members of the family of the lost victim.

I can't imagine anything probably more horrific than having to spend a night with your loved one, still in the water so we'll do everything we possibly can to try to find them as quickly as possible.

(bright upbeat music) - [Bret] Most diving excursions bring peace and relaxation.

- [ Todd] Driving really isn't a thrill seeking thing.

I think more people get injured bowling than they do diving.

Most people just wanna dive as an escape to swim around, enjoy themselves and look at stuff, you know have the comradery of our groups.

- The upfront costs can be a little shocking to some people.

Might think for the classes and if you wanna full set of gear, it's probably gonna cost you about 2,000 dollars but after that, it's pretty cheap if you dive local.

It's $4 for a fill in your tank and we can go on and dive.

If I'm near water, I always wanna jump in and see what's in there.

You know, what am I missing out on by staying on shore?

I carry my camera every dive.

I don't turn it on and shoot every day but it's definitely with me every time I get in the water.

- [Bret] The first time Curtis attempted to film his friend Doug catching fish under water, a bass hammered the lure right in front of his camera.

They were hooked and went on a film all sorts of fish like sunfish, crappies, rainbow trout, Northern pike.

- I really like showing people fish in the freshwater lakes.

All the saltwater stuff that I shoot is really great and it's pretty and everything but anybody can see that.

- [Bret] Like Curtis, Todd prefers seeing natural over planted items in the water.

- I'd rather go see these other items, the mining artifacts, the fish, good visibility, that's more important to me.

It's a great stress reliever 'cause when you go down, you don't have your phone, you don't have anybody talking to you.

The only sound that you hear is your breathing.

It's really nice, quiet, peaceful.

(bright upbeat music) - [Chad] But I have reduce the amount of beef I eat because I'm getting the nutrition I need from crickets and worms and I'm helping the world out.

- [Bre] Edging the weed suppression mat, the instruction booklet and of course the native plants.

(bright upbeat music) (bright upbeat music) - Barbecued crickets.

Well, yeah that's delicious.

Oh yeah.

- [Claire] Good crunch?

- Good flavor, good crunch.

And then it's lunchtime so I'm kinda hungry anyway.

I'm probably gonna eat this whole bowl.

That was really good.

I spend a lot of time in the wild so there's no doubt I've probably swallowed a few bugs but never intentionally until I met Chad and Claire Simons at 3 Cricketeers in St. Louis Park.

They produce about a thousand pounds of crickets per month with very little environmental impact.

(bright upbeat music) So why would somebody choose to raise insects for a living?

Chad studied alternative proteins as an environmental law student.

And when a son came home with a cricket cookie on earth day, he was inspired.

Chad thought it would be fun to raise crickets in their basement.

But when he brought the idea to his wife Claire, the first word she uttered was-- - Gross.

I was really scared.

I think the first time we were cooking them we did have a few drinks in between and it was definitely an experience and we've definitely improved.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- [Bret] Claire is a nurse and passionate about nutrition.

So when she learned that only two tablespoons of cricket powder have 15 grams of protein and are an excellent source of B12, iron, calcium and prebiotic fiber, she hopped on the cricket train.

Started sneaking it into everything we ate and the boys loved it and they jumped on board too.

So that's 3 Cricketeers for our three boys.

- They love my hamburgers, you know and I love my steak but I have reduced the amount of beef I eat because I'm getting the nutrition I need from crickets and worms and I'm helping the world out, you know, environmentally.

First operation was a set up underneath the counter in our laundry room, in the basement.

We had a couple 20 gallon totes filled with wet peat moss at the bottom, just the bottom layer.

We build a terrarium down there where they could stay warm and they hatched the first time.

So we thought, oh, we can do this so we moved up to a 700 foot, square foot warehouse after that.

- It was definitely fun to be able to grow them and it was not that difficult.

(bright upbeat music) - [Bret] 3 Cricketeers' current facility is 3,500 square feet and holds 5 million crickets.

- Here we have crickets.

See them growing in there and these are about two weeks old.

That's a ground up organic chicken feed in there.

And then we use these water bottles that people can use with chickens.

We just put paper towel in there so they don't drown in the water when they crawl in there to get a drink.

- [Chad] It just looks like they're hanging at the beach.

- [Claire] They're hanging out in those condo.

- So yeah, you can see below here we have a chipboard bottle partitions.

And then that gives them a lot of surface area to crawl on and they, they like to be covered by something 'cause they like to hide.

- They like to hide, be in the dark and together so they don't try to get out of here.

And they only jump six inches.

So they really, they're happy.

- So right now I'm gonna take this off and there's gonna be an egg pan underneath where they lay their eggs.

- [Claire] Females can lay up to a hundred eggs a day.

- Right here we have the incubator.

So once we take these pie pans filled with peat moss that have eggs in them, we put them in here.

So what you see here are the little, what we call pinheads.

The hatchlings, they've just hatched.

- [Bret] After the pin heads are about three days old, egg trays go into four by eight chipboard partitions and crickets are harvested after a month.

First they stop feedings to clear the insects digestive tracks.

All that poop is sold for plant food.

Then crickets are placed in a 50 degree Fahrenheit environment where they go into hibernation before they're frozen and transferred to a commercial kitchen.

- After they come in frozen, we boil them and then we dehydrate them in the dehydrator.

We then meld them into a very fine powder so it's just like flour and we can make cookies with them, we make flavored roasted crickets with the whole cricket and other products that we're coming out with soon.

- I tried a molasses cookie that has five grams of protein and not a hint of cricket crunch or taste.

I'll take every single one.

(bright upbeat music) 3 Cricketeers sell some of their powder to food businesses.

Chef Gustavo Romero owns Nixta Tortilleria in Minneapolis.

He makes four to 5,000 tortillas a week using heirloom corn from Oaxaca and Central Mexico where he grew up.

Chef Gustavo and his staff prepare 180 to 200 takeout meals a week and add cricket powder to tortillas when customers ask for it.

- We first started with the crickets.

This one, they come to me frozen from the Cricketeers.

I am now with you as we dry them, throw them in the oven dehydrator until they're completely dry then we just put her in a food processor or a grinder and then we pulverize it.

After it is pulverize, we add about tablespoon of cricket powder for a pound of dough and then that's what the dough will look like.

Just kinda a little bit of color because the, the dough is white.

And then after that, then when you just press it 'cause we have to press it by hand so we don't contaminate machine.

And then you ended up with a tortilla.

It's a lot of people they're still afraid of trying crickets.

I grew up eating them which is something that we eat as a snack back home.

And the more that I learned how good it is for you, I think it's an opportunity for people that like something else in meat as source of protein.

I think people are gonna be super excited.

- [Bret] 3 Cricketeers also sells their products at farmer's markets, specialty stores and online to customers like Kiah Brasch who's been eating insects since she was a student at the University of Minnesota, Duluth.

- That my professor actually brought in cricket cookies and I didn't even know that it was possible to eat insects before that.

And I was a little bit hesitant the first time that I ate them.

And once I tried them and started learning more about how they're raised and all of the sustainability aspects of eating insects, I thought, why haven't I heard of this before.

- [Bret] She reached out to insect eaters called entomophagists to learn how to forage for insects and prepare them.

- [Kiah] I have tried crickets was the first one and then I tried mealworms.

I love mealworms.

- [Bret] Kiah went on to teach in Thailand where insect farming is a huge industry.

- [Kiah] I would go to the 7-Eleven and just like there's bags of chips by the checkout register.

There were bags of crickets.

They had barbecue flavor, sea salt flavor.

- [Bret] Kiah now lives in St. Paul and forages for grasshoppers in our country friends short grass fields that haven't been sprayed with pesticides.

- They are very tricky to catch sometimes.

So sometimes the caloric output when you're trying to catch them can be more than you're eating but I do it more for like the adventure of it.

You really have to get up early to get out there 'cause that's when they're a little bit slower, they're a little bit easier to catch.

I don't use a net, I just use my hands.

They're just easier to catch that way.

My favorite way to eat those is to first boil them, to kind of cook them all the way through and they turn this bright red, like a lobster.

It's so cool to watch.

Sometimes I'll roast them after that and put them in the oven, sometimes I'll coat them in seasoning.

And usually the way I like to eat them is tacos.

They make a really mean taco.

While I do love foraging for insects, it is a lot of work.

And so the solution that I came up with was this beautiful contraption right here.

This is from a company called Living Farms.

So this is a growing system for mealworms.

There are multiple bins as you can see here for different stages in the mealworm life cycle.

So a lot of people have, you know, if they can they have backyard chickens and things like that.

Well, I don't even have to have a backyard for this.

I can just put this on my counter and I can grow my own protein.

- [Bret] Kiah is a middle school science teacher and introduces students to insects at their level of getting past the ick factor.

Mealworm banana bread is a starter food.

The next level up is chocolate covered grasshoppers.

(bright upbeat music) - [Chad] Recently over the course of the past three years, I mean, we've seen a huge upturn in interest and openness to the eating insects in general.

And like you know, a lot of people are seeking us out now.

So it's really, really changed over the last three years.

- [Kiah] Over 80 percent of the world's cultures use insects in some way in their cuisine.

They have known the secret and us in the Western world we're kind of just catching up to that.

(bright upbeat music) (bright upbeat music) - I built the five by five garden.

Just in that space, I noticed so much about diversity in the insects and the plants and everything that it really struck me that anybody just even doing a small five-by-five space really makes a really big difference.

(bright upbeat music) I'm always telling my friends about how important it is to plant native plants and they obviously support me, they think I'm cool guy.

But I feel like we've hadn't made it simple enough for normal people and small landscapes and normal backyards, restricted budgets that sort of thing to do such a thing.

It's hard to know where to start, It's hard to know what plants to choose.

So we figured with our expertise let's try to put together a package that's everything anybody could need to really make a big difference in a small landscape with a tight budget.

- One of the cool things about the My Pocket Prairie kit different than just a a regular native plant kit that we've been selling for years is that it comes with instructions for the assembly, but also a predesigned layout.

So we know that this layout will work well, we know it looks nice, it supports pollinators and it really helps any backyard gardener answer how do I do this or am I gonna screw this up?

It kind of takes all the guesswork out of it.

- I grow something like 200 different species.

So it was, it took all of us to finally vet these nine that we wanted to narrow it down to.

It was certainly an adventure coming up with the materials for how we actually build the installation kit, sourcing them through all sorts of different other small businesses within the area and ultimately I think we're really happy with what we came up.

- The cost of the five by five My pocket Prairie bundle is $150 that comes with the edging the weed suppression mat, the instruction booklet and of course the native plants.

(bright upbeat music) - What you're having here is a full garden kit.

So everything needed to build a five by five little Pocket Prairie.

We're gonna save the plants for last.

This is made from a Aspen byproducts and it's a biodegradable.

This is what's going to kinda choke out your turf grass, compete with invasive weeds and nurture your plants over about a three-year period until it decomposes.

And here are our native perennials.

We have 27 plants total and nine different species, all native to Minnesota, selected for their various boom times and colors and their great ecological value.

We're gonna lay down our mat in the desired location.

I will temporarily staple it in.

With the mat in place, we can then start to cut out the edge.

Ultimately, we're going to flip all the sod and till our garden up in dislocation.

So the first plant in our series is the Slender Penstemon and this is gonna be our first flower to bloom each year, May through June.

And as you can see, it's right on time.

Next is going to be the Butterfly Milkweeds.

You'll see that, three planted in a row here, the monarchs tend to prefer to lay their eggs in clusters of milkweeds.

Three is our Purple Prairie Clover, four is Rattlesnake Master, it's definitely a favorite amongst many.

Five we have our echinacea.

In this case specifically, Narrow Leaved Coneflower.

Number six in your planting sequence is the Meadow Blazing Star.

Number seven is a Greg Goldenrod.

It's a short Stafford yellow flower.

So it's gonna be an autumn bloom along with the Sky Blue Aster which will be your second autumn bloom.

So this Little Bluestem grasses which is number nine in the series.

It's gonna add structure and supports to the Forbes.

(bright upbeat music) - So My Pocket Prairie bundle provides a lot of benefits with those deep rooted native plant species.

They're filtering groundwater, preventing erosion, hosting native pollinators and songbirds alike.

- I think about the insects alot and I think about the ecosystem a lot and that's why I figured we could do our part to make it easy for everybody else to help make a difference.

It's almost like a, it makes you feel less alone.

There's all sorts of critters coexisting besides us and it's something I think we should feel good about.

(bright upbeat music) (bright upbeat music) - [Announcer] Funding for this program was provided by Safe Basements of Minnesota, your basement waterproofing and foundation repair specialist since 1990.

Peace of mind is a safe basement.

Live Wide Open, the more people know about West central Minnesota, the more reasons they have to live here.

More at livewideopen.com.

Western Minnesota Prairie waters where peace, relaxation and opportunities await and the members of Pioneer PBS.

Howard and Brainer today at the Minnesota School of Diving and we gonna go diving at Cuyuna.

They got a suit specially made for me right here.

(moving waters)