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Story and photos by Alena Maschke On a frigid morning in late February, Mexican guest workers Juan Manuel Rico Olalde and Jose David Lopez Velazquez traverse William Hetzel’s 40-acre crawfish pond on Hetzel Road in Crowley, knee-deep in ice-cold water.
Olalde has been coming to the U.S. for the annual harvest from his native Guanajuato, a historic mining town of colorful houses on steep mountainsides and a temperate climate, for more than ten years. Working through two cold fronts of below freezing temperatures has been tough. “It’s hard, but we continue,” Olalde says. “As long as it’s not frozen, we work.” The crawfish too have taken note of the cold temperatures, without allowing it to stop them in their tracks completely. “We’re two weeks behind on size and quantity,” Hetzel said, a development he attributes to the unusually cold weather during the first two months of the year. During cold weather, crawfish turn to molting. This is positive for farmers and consumers — molting increases the crawfish’s size — but delays the harvest. During the process of molting, crawfish are vulnerable to predators, leading them to hide rather than venture into the traps. “It slowed the numbers of crawfish coming out the field,” Hetzel said. Hetzel grew up around crawfish. His father started the family business in 1978, selling to local docks and processors, before starting his own dock in 1990. Growing up, Hetzel remembers coming back from school to a driveway lined with crawfish. “We would have to park on the road to get to the house and I would go straight to work — we would wash, crawl through, load trucks,” Hetzel remembers. He’s always had his crawfish ponds — 80 acres total, with 40 acres in crawfish rotation each year — but began farming in earnest in 2018. At the time, he was still working as a cardiovascular technician at a local hospital, a position he gave up in 2020 in response to vaccination requirements in the medical field, turning to the family business as his livelihood instead. “I just always had a passion for it,” Hetzel said. Now, five years in, crawfish is his main source of income as the sole breadwinner for a family of five. Like most farming, it’s a fickle and unpredictable business that is highly dependent on each year’s weather conditions, but Hetzel is optimistic about this season. “Two years ago, it was a high volume season. Last year was a very low volume season. And then this year is more of a normal season,” he concluded. Todd Fontenot, crawfish specialist at the LSU AgCenter agrees. “I'd say 90% of our producers are reporting that they're definitely having a much better year than last year,” Fontenot said. The 2023 drought meant that many farmers didn’t put as much acreage into production in the following season as they may have planned to, and those who did saw high costs and low yields. “We had a much more normal fall of 2024. After rice harvest, the conditions were much better than they were the previous fall,” Fontenot said. The season already started promising, he noted, with some farmers beginning to harvest before the start of the new year. And while the cold fronts reduced harvest yields temporarily, Fontenot noted that farmers who held out last year likely ramped up production for this season given the favorable conditions, continuing a trend of consistently growing acreage over the past decade. “We do have a lot of acreage. We’re probably going to harvest a higher acreage this year than ever before,” Fontenot predicted. While Fontenot estimates that 90,000 - 100,000 in acreage remained out of production last season, he points to estimates by the Farm Service Agency of 400,000 acres in production this time around. How those ponds will fare and whether there will be a longer season because of the delays caused by the cold is difficult to predict. “Mother nature could always throw us a curveball,” Fontenot said. But, he said, “if those acres produce well, that is definitely a lot of crawfish on the market.”
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