Crawfish farmers singing the ‘mudbug blues’

It’s the time of year that crawfish farmers call the “sweet spot,” a time when they should be feeling flush with cash. But this year as they scramble to fill the orders that always flood in during the Lenten season, some are feeling glum. “It’s been a horrible year,” says Stephen Minvielle, executive director of the Louisiana Crawfish Farmers Association. “This past weekend, we could have used another 10,000 sacks of production to sell, but we could not produce it.” Louisiana leads the nation in crawfish production, putting as much as 100 million pounds on the market in a good year, according to the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board. Upward of 1,500 crawfish farms operate in the state. Nearly all are located along the I-10 corridor, particularly in St. Martin and Acadia parishes. To produce the ideal harvest, farmers need a perfect combination of air temperatures, moisture and water quality, but this year everything that could go wrong, did. Early in the season, Minvielle says, hurricanes put “a huge amount of water and bio matter” into the ground where the mudbugs had burrowed to reproduce. Shortly thereafter, a drought descended on the region. “Either by itself is bad, but when you get one back-to-back with the other you’ve got a big problem,” he says. Minvielle, who is a crawfish producer, says it costs him about $30,000 annually to operate and maintain his 80-acre farm near New Iberia. “I will be ecstatic if I finish the season one penny in the black,” he says. Despite low production, Minvielle says wholesalers have held a line on prices. As a result, consumers may get relatively good buys. A spot check of markets along the corridor on Monday found prices for live crawfish hovered around $2.40 a pound. – Kathy Finn