Jose Oritz pulls up a crawfish trap in Stephen Minvielle’s pond Tuesday. So far this year, there are fewer crawfish and smaller crawfish overall than in past years because of weather conditions, experts say.
Jose Oritz pulls up a crawfish trap in Stephen Minvielle’s pond Tuesday. So far this year, there are fewer crawfish and smaller crawfish overall than in past years because of weather conditions, experts say.
Lee Ball / The Daily Iberian
Stephen Minvielle heads out into his large crawfish pond in Iberia Parish.
Lack of rain and unseasonably cold weather have combined to cause crawfish farmers, crawfishermen and retailers to fall short of the high demand during the peak season for boiled crawfish.
Crawfish farmers only produced about 10 to 20 percent of the normal average in January and February, said Stephen Minvielle, director of the Louisiana Crawfish Farmers Association, director at the Louisiana Crawfish Research and Promotion Board and a crawfish farmer with a pond in Iberia Parish.
“I make around $300 to $350 a day,” Minvielle said. “There were about 50 to 60 days I didn’t make that amount. What I’m making in the next two months has to make up for that, plus cover daily costs.”
Farmers right now are catching about 50 percent of the average — about 200 to 210 pounds a day instead of the usual 400 to 600 pounds a day, Minvielle said.
“We can’t get back the days that we lost,” he said.
The crawfish industry as a whole, including farm and wild-caught crawfish, is producing about 4,000 sacks a day, but they need to be catching about 10,000 sacks a day, Minvielle said.
“We’re getting calls from people in Louisiana and Texas who want 50 sacks, but we can only let them have 12 or 15 sacks. I’m getting 50 to 100 calls a week, but I have to tell them, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t have enough,’ ” he said.
Erron Derouen, owner of Snack-n-Go on Lewis Street, said he missed out on a month and a half of business because of the cold weather.
“Since we lost that month and a half, now all I really have is maybe three months to be open,” Derouen said. “It will take me a month to a month and a half to catch the money from summer. So all I have is a month or a month and a half to make a profit.”
Derouen said last year he was buying an average of 20 sacks a day, but now he’s averaging about 10 sacks a day.
“The price is still so high that we’re not selling as much as we normally would. We have to charge almost $6 a pound for boiled crawfish,” he said. “Last year, people would buy 20 to 25 pounds. Now they’re only coming and buying 10 pounds because the price is so out of hand, and that all goes back to the shortage of crawfish. The more they have, the cheaper it will be.”
Last year, Derouen was selling boiled crawfish for about $4 a pound, he said.
Ray McClain, LSU AgCenter crawfish researcher, said crawfish growth is affected by the cold and the rainfall. When temperatures are cold, the crawfish don’t feed or go to the traps, plus they don’t grow quickly, he said.
“Any market-sized animals out in the field are slow to come to baited traps during cold weather. The young crawfish are not able to grow and reach market size very quickly during prolonged cold periods,” McClain said. “So the cold weather affects the harvest of animals but also the recruitment of animals to the market size category.”
Also contributing to the problem is the lack of rain in the fall, McClain said.
“Most of the population of crawfish comes from hatchlings that normally come out in the fall. They normally come out when ponds are flooded, and then we get some significant rainfall after ponds are flooded. That’s when most of the young-of-the-year appear. The young-of-the-year is what constitutes the bulk of the harvest,” he said.
In late rainfall years, when the hatchlings come out late, they don’t have the opportunity for growth before winter hits, so they don’t have any growth prior to an extended period of warm weather in the spring, McClain said.
The optimum water temperature for crawfish growth is between 72 and 78 degrees, he said.
Jody David, the Inland Fisheries biologist manager with the state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, Opelousas district, said wild crawfish harvesting success depends on the water levels and Atchafalaya River stages. When the water levels are up, the catches increase, he said.
Right now, the water level is at 10.4 feet at Butte La Rose, which is not favorable for harvesting crawfish in the Atchafalaya Basin, David said, but the crawfishermen are used to that and know where to put their traps.
“If the water is falling quick, they have to hurry up and move traps to somewhere else,” he said. “The cold water cuts down on catch rates. The extended cold weather affects the growth of crawfish … If there’s a warm spell, crawfish will start to grow, and then (the crawfishermen) can harvest, but the harvest will be lower because of the cold. But the harvest should start to increase.”
