98% of the crawfish consumed in the United States comes from our neighbors in South Louisiana. If you're a crawfish fan, you may have noticed a post that's gone viral on social media with a dire outlook for crawfish this year.
On this week's edition of "Weekend Insight," TPR's Jerry Clayton went straight to the source of the report, Mark Shirley, Crawfish Specialist with the LSU AG Center and Louisiana Sea Grant in Abbeville, Louisiana.
Clayton: There are maybe some people who aren't aware of this, but most crawfish come from farms. Tell us how crawfish farming works.
Shirley: We have over 300,000 acres that should be producing crawfish right now, just in Louisiana. Texas probably has around 15,000 to 20,000. These ponds are also used for rice production.
You stock crawfish in those fields sometime in May or June while the rice is growing. And then you flood up those fields again in the fall. And supposedly those crawfish will come out with their babies and populate the pond, and all through the winter and spring we have some crawfish to send over to you guys in Texas.
Clayton: So your report that went viral on social media painted a pretty bleak picture of the crawfish situation. What's led up to all this?
Shirley: Well, I've been in this job for 40 years now, and it's the worst season I've ever seen. And it's all due to the severe drought we had here in South Louisiana and pretty much throughout the South. The summer months were really dry. The fall going into September, October, November, they were extremely dry.
Crawfish is an aquatic animal. Without water they just don't survive too well. A lot of those crawfish that we should be catching right now, they just died, and all the rain we have right now is not doing any good, because all those crawfish are dead.
But a few crawfish that did survive came out in December with some babies, which is a late hatch. And that's what's kind of growing in the ponds right now, but I'm seeing very few of those.
Clayton: So, 2024 looks dismal for crawfish. What about 2025? Do you see any improvement by then?
Shirley: Well, we’ve got some issues. We'll see how things play out, but all these fields that don't have crawfish production this year need to be restocked. So quite a few hundreds of thousands of acres need to be restocked with mature crawfish sometime in May and June. It's the time to restock them. And I'm not sure where we're going to get the stock to do that. The ponds very likely will not have enough supply to stock.
Now we also have the Atchafalaya basin. That's a big tributary area of the Mississippi River between Lafayette and Baton Rouge. That inland swamp area produces or can produce a lot of crawfish if they have sufficient water all through the spring.
So, usually water levels in the basin start coming up in March and April and can extend out into June, July. And, like I say, if there's enough water, all those fishermen can get back in the swamps, in the woods and the marshes and put out the traps and harvest a pretty good amount of crawfish. So, we're crossing our fingers that that'll be the case.
Clayton: This all sounds like a real financial disaster for the crawfish farmers in Louisiana.
Shirley: A lot of their cost to produce this crop has already been spent. So, they've already paid for the stock that they put into the ponds last May and June. They paid an exorbitant amount for pumping... it was so dry during September, October, November.
They tripled or quadrupled their cost of pumping. It just evaporated as fast as they were pumping it into those ponds. So, they already have over $200 worth of costs invested in those fields. And so far, they haven't gotten but maybe $0.50 worth of crawfish out of them. So, these farmers are going to be in a bind this year.
