Crawfish crop weakened
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A dismally slow start to Louisiana’s crawfish season is straining the finances of farmers and driving up retail prices for consumers of the popular crustaceans.
Compared to the same time last year, crawfish production is down as much as 60 percent to 70 percent in some areas of the state, and Baton Rouge-area retail prices are already up by $1 or more a pound, farmers and retailers said.
Stephen Minvielle, a crawfish farmer who heads the Louisiana Crawfish Farmers Association, said his small 80-acre operation near New Iberia is struggling to overcome the slow start.
Minvielle said his farm usually covers its startup expenses by the second week of Lent and shuts down a few weeks after Easter Sunday.
“This year if I go to the last week in June I’ll be lucky if I break even,” he said.
This year’s early crop was hurt by a combination of an unusually dry summer followed by Hurricane Gustav, said Greg Lutz, a professor at the LSU Agricultural Center’s Aquaculture Research Station.
Lutz said some mature crawfish that burrowed underground during the summer months died due to lack of moisture. Later, the Gustav floodwaters forced other mudbugs out of the ground and into stagnant waters, Lutz said, where they were picked off by birds and other predators or suffocated in the oxygen-poor waters.
Both weather events came during a key stage of the crawfish’s reproductive cycle, he said, and the crawfish industry is only now realizing how severe the impact was.
“We’re definitely off to a slow start,” Lutz said. “Most of what we would have expected the normal early crop hasn’t been there at all.”
Lutz said the catch at the Agricultural Center’s crawfish test ponds in Baton Rouge is down 40 percent to 50 percent this year.
Lutz said because the early crop was so poor, there is still plenty of food available for the remaining crawfish, which could help provide a boost as the season progresses.
Production in many areas across the state has picked up slightly in the past two weeks, farmers and retailers say, but it remains unclear whether it will be enough to meet peak-season demand or help farmers recoup their early losses.
In the meantime, many farmers are waiting and hoping a strong later season will at least cover their initial investments.
“For those guys who are out there with no crawfish in their traps, or small crawfish that they’re just waiting until they’re big enough to justify harvesting, it’s a very difficult situation right now,” Lutz said.
Consumers could feel the pinch as well.
Retail prices in Baton Rouge were running between $4 and $5 for a pound of boiled crawfish last week, an increase over 2008 early season prices.
And although prices generally drop when supplies increase during the peak season in late March and April, Bill Pizzolato, co-owner of Tony’s Seafood on Plank Road, said he’s not sure if the supply can keep up with the demand as the weather warms and backyard crawfish boils become more popular.
“This is the kickoff for the crawfish season,” he said. “When you get to Lent, that’s when your demand just spikes.”
Pizzolato said that two weeks ago Tony’s was able to buy only an average of 15 sacks of crawfish a day, usually from commercial ponds in the Ville Platte and Crowley areas. Last Thursday alone the company bought more than 150 sacks from a supplier, he said, thanks to the recent bout of warm weather.
But the weekend cold spell has him worried.
“We don’t know how much the cold weather is going to hurt us because it could maybe slow down production if it lasts too long,” he said. “We need consistent warm weather for the quality.”
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