On a cool, clear January morning, LSU AgCenter Crawfish Specialist Mark Shirley and Vermilion Parish crawfish farmer Adla Stelly go from pond to pond, looking for crawfish.
This is what they find: dragonfly larvae - something crawfish normally eat.
"Usually you find a few of those, but not. Not like, you know, if anything, it tells you that, you know, the the water quality is good enough for the bugs to survive. Yeah. but there's just no crawfish," Shirley says.
Shirley has 40 years experience working with crawfish and says he would normally find lots of baby crawfish at this time of year.
"So far in the last several months, I've checked quite a few crawfish ponds here in Vermilion and Acadia Parish and some other areas. And I'm just not finding the normal population of crawfish that we should have for this time of year," he says.
But now?
"I'm seeing zero crawfish," he says, gesturing to a pond. "I dipped right here in this pond. And that I did for ten or 15 minutes. I still haven't found a crawfish. Normally, I'd find some little crawfish that would be maybe a half inch or an inch and a half. Especially this time of year. But by early a mid-January, we should be seeing some of those young crawfish that were hashed out sometime in October, November, December.
"We should be seeing some of those right now. And we're not seeing many at all."
There are several reasons for that.
"Well, it was so hot and so dry that the ground cracked open and those tubes that they were in those burrows dried up. So they just dried up and died. And they only die once and whatever we do now is not going to bring them back to life. So we just have very few crawfish survive that dry period all through the late summer and fall," he says.
Aside from farming crawfish, Stelly also buys crawfish from other farmers. He usually would buy and sell 350 to 400 sacks a day. But on this day, a farmer delivered a sack and a half.
"I had a friend in northern north at an estate from here. he checked 800 traps, come in with 4 lbs.. I've had stories of, you know, other guys running, you know, a thousand traps and catching a sack. You know, that some some of the better stories I've heard in the area. You know, normally the same thousand traps at this time of the year would possibly be 10 to 15 sacks," Stelly says.
It costs a farmer the same amount of time, money, fuel and labor to get one sack of crawfish from 1,000 traps as it does 15 - and that's why even with higher prices, farmers are not making any money. And this might be only the start.
"So the drought disaster that a farmer is going through right now is affecting this season, the 2024 season crawfish, but it's also going to affect next year A lot of the fields that don't have any crawfish this year will have to be restocked," Shirley says.
Stelly says it may take a disaster declaration to keep crawfish farmers in business, which is why many are looking to Louisiana Farm Bureau.
"Farm Bureau has been there, you know, multiple times in the past. And they always dare to try to help and do the best they can. But, you know, I see all the farmers and, you know, in the area to, you know, let their let the people that they know know what's going on, their politicians and their their friends and stuff, you know, And, we'll see if we can get something done," he says.
