Here are the general steps you’d need to follow, roughly in order:
- Procure a market. The market for venoms is very limited, and there are already producers supplying them. You would need to cultivate contacts and secure contracts well in advance of investing in building a facility unless you want to quickly go bankrupt. Venoms use for research and antivenom production are produced to the customer’s specification, so you’ll have to know what species’ venoms are needed, in what quantity, on what schedule, and what kinds of testing and certifications must be provided in order for your customer to purchase them.
- Obtain a very large sum of cash. Building a facility to house and breed invertebrates shouldn’t be super-expensive, but things like security measures, government permits (by the way, there will be serious limitations on where you can locate your facility, based on prevailing state and local laws), extraction equipment, and the specially-equipped laboratories needed to analyze and certify the venoms’ purity, assay, etc. will be pretty costly.
- Obtain animals with which to start your production. This will entail either purchase of captive-bred specimens or possibly a tornado of government regulatory paperwork in order to remove a few specimens from the wild. Of course, you’ll have to start with a few pairs and breed them, so a decent amount of time will be needed in order to establish a full colony. I’m guessing that in order to fulfill enough orders to support a business (if this indeed is even possible), you’ll be talking about at least tens of thousands of animals.
- Find experienced staff who can maintain the animals, deal with legal, insurance, and regulatory paperwork and record-keeping, perform extractions, perform laboratory analysis of extracted venoms, process venoms via lyophilization and other techniques, store and ship orders according to legal requirements, provide expert customer assistance (so we’re talking about needing a staff of trained entomologists, toxicologists, and/or biochemists), etc.
- Sit back and enjoy your new business!
(Not trying to be discouraging, but I feel like there’s a 1–2 percent chance of anyone being able to succeed at a new business doing this sort of thing, due to the massive up-front costs, the long time needed to recover your investment, the massively complex legal and scientific considerations, etc. If I had a large sum of money to invest, I would sleep better knowing I’d spent it on lottery tickets than investing in a scorpion venom farm, to be honest.)
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