Crawfish season looks promising

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Conditions are good for the crawfish season that is about to kick into harvest season.
“It looks like conditions were all pretty good for what looks like a good crawfish season,” said Todd Fontenot, Evangeline Parish county agent.
Reports from farmers are coming in slow right now, he said.
“A lot of farmers are just now getting their labor in. There were a lot traps put out in the last two weeks,” he said.
“A lot of them are just starting to go fish, but some early reports look very promising,” Fontenot said.
The south Louisiana crawfish is staple for the Lenten season, so the report of a healthy harvest is good news.
The crawfish crop in 2018 was valued at $208,509,840 in Louisiana, according to an LSU AgCenter report. There were 1,714 producers, the crawfish were harvested from 237,234 acres and the state’s total came in at 151,818,725 pounds.
Acadia Parish is the Tri-Parish’s crawfish leader, according to a 2018 report, the latest available from the LSU AgCenter. Acadia Parish had 245 producers raising crawfish on about 42,000 acres. The Acadia Parish crop of 27.3 million pounds was valued at $37,674,000.
St. Landry Parish’s 220 producers harvested 15 million pounds of crawfish from 25 acres of ponds. The crop’s value was $20.7 million.
Evangeline Parish had 106 producers with a total of 22,000 acres of crawfish ponds. About 15.4 million pounds were harvested with a value of $21.3 million.
Fontenot said the season begins to take shape when rice is harvested in the fall. This year the rice harvest went well and took place without farmers rutting fields. The lack of ruts will make the crawfish harvest easier, he said
“We haven’t had a real cold winter yet, so the vegetation, the forage that the crawfish eat, looks pretty good,” he said.
Sometimes a hard freeze hits early and kills the vegetation, which then decomposes too early in the season, he said.
This year the forage looks in good condition, he said. “In most places they have plenty of forage for crawfish.”
Crawfish are underground making it a little difficult to know exactly what’s happening with them.
“But I believe we didn’t have a super dry fall so hopefully that ground down below where they are in those burrows didn’t get too dry,” he said.
The plus side for those waiting for their first boiled crawfish is there has been no severe extremes in the weather since fall.
“We’ve had a pretty mild winter so far,” Fontenot said.