Moving Forward

As St. Landry parish aquaculture producers begin pulling crawfish from their ponds this month, they are harvesting a crop that has a substantial economic value to south Louisiana and a critter that has become ubiquitous as a symbol of south Louisiana.

More than 1,600 farmers produce crawfish in some 111,000 acres of ponds in Louisiana, according to the Crawfish Promotion and Research Board. Another 800 commercial fishermen harvest crawfish from natural wetlands, primarily the Atchafalaya Basin. The combined annual yield ranges from 120 million to 150 million pounds.

Aquaculture generates more than $2.5 million at the farm gate in the St. Landry Parish each year, and that much or more for wholesalers and processors such as Riceland Seafood or and Prairie Cajun Seafood in Eunice, or Atchafalaya Basin Seafood in Krotz Springs.

Boiled crawfish, once a staple only for backyard social gatherings, have become one of the leading draws to restaurants in St. Landry 

Parish and across south Louisiana, and it is practically impossible to find a south Louisiana restaurant that does not offer crawfish in some form.

The total economic impact on the Louisiana economy exceeds $300 million annually, and more than 7,000 people depend directly or indirectly on the crawfish industry, according to the marketing board.

Commercial sale of Louisiana crawfish began only in the late 1800s, when there were no pond-raised crawfish (at least not deliberately so), and practically the whole crop came from the Atchafalaya Basin.

Typically, crawfish are grown as a second crop by St. Landry rice farmers. After rice is harvested in July and August, the fields are flooded as crawfish ponds in September and October, and the crawfish harvest can begin as early as November in warm years such as this one. Once the crawfish are harvested, the field is drained, prepared for the next rice crop, and the cycle is begun for the next year.

But that’s a relatively new process. The first record of a commercial crawfish harvest in the entire United States was in 1880, when 23,400 pounds of crawfish with a value of $2,140 were taken from the Atchafalaya Basin. In 1908, a U.S. Census report listed Louisiana’s crawfish production at 88,000 pounds, with a value of $3,600.

Better transportation and development of cold storage began to expand the market in the years following the Great Depression.

Quick delivery opened markets in Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and other cities—although there still weren’t many places outside of south Louisiana interested, or even aware, of the little critters.

Biologist Percy Viosca was one of the first to push the idea that crawfish could be grown in ponds. He wrote about it in the 1930s, but it was 1950, before the legislature gave the Wildlife and Fisheries Commission a little money to study the idea.

As the idea spread, farmers and processors began to realize that crawfish farming was a good way to have a supply practically all year 

long, which, in turn, made it easier to sell them to restaurants that wanted a regular supply. By the middle 1960s south Louisiana sported some ten thousand acres of managed ponds. They produced enough crawfish for a fledgling picking and packing industry to begin, and that led to more aggressive marketing both inside and outside the state.

More restaurants began featuring them in their menus, dishes such as crawfish étouffée became known worldwide, and all of that reinforced the renaissance of a dying Louisiana French culture that began to storm back to life in the 1970s.

The crawfish was designated Louisiana’s official state crustacean in 1983, and no visitor can come to Louisiana without saying that they’ve dined on crawfish and purchased a plate or T-shirt of keychain or some other item marked with the iconic crawfish.

As crawfish historian and author Sam Irwin say in a recent book about them, “Crawfish are taking over the world one epicurean at a time.”