After the toughest season in decades, crawfish farmers hope for better luck next year

Story and photos by Alena Maschke 

Looking out onto his sugarcane fields from his porch on a warm early June afternoon, Chad Hanks is hopeful. After weeks sprinkled with days of heavy rain, the ground is moist. “The cane is as beautiful as it’s ever been,” the cane and crawfish farmer observed. 
 
Last summer, Hanks was looking at a very different picture. “Last year at this time, we were well into subsurface moisture deficiency,” said Hanks. And while Louisiana’s sugarcane industry managed to defy the most grim predictions, producing 1.3 million tons of sugar in the 2023 harvest, crawfish farmers weren’t so lucky.
 
A hot, dry summer led to unprecedented losses for the state’s crawfish industry, as seed crawfish died in their dried out burrows and farmers had to dedicate significant resources to keeping the fields flooded for the new generation to grow.
 
“It was just evaporating, the pumps were running constantly and they just couldn’t keep up,” said LSU AgCenter’s crawfish specialist, Mark Shirley, whose job of advising farmers on how to improve their yield was made nearly impossible by the brutally hot and dry weather. “It was frustrating because you’re trying to battle Mother Nature.”
 
When it came time to harvest, the devastation became apparent. “They did all the steps to produce the crop, but when they set up the traps the crawfish weren’t there,” Shirley said. 
 
Now, as crawfish farmers stock their rice fields and ponds for the new season, the impacts of those losses are still apparent. Crawfish for seeding is hard to come by and sold at a premium as a result. 
 
Doug Zaunbrecher, whose family farms crawfish near Eunice, said the only reason they still harvest into June is to have enough crawfish to seed. And while other farms are reducing the amount of crawfish they seed per acre as a result of the current market conditions, the Zaunbrechers are going all in by seeding double this year.
 
“We’re just taking a gamble,” Zaunbrecher said. 
 
There’s only so many ways to face uncertainty in the farming business and for the Zaunbrechers, the strategy is to go full steam ahead. “We don’t know what next year will bring,” Phillip Zaunbrecher said. “We’re trying to get the volume back in the ground.”
 
That the volume wouldn’t be there for this past season became apparent in October 2023. Shirley remembers checking the ponds for young crawfish and coming up with nothing. “The babies weren’t there,” he said. Hanks, a 20-year veteran advocate for the Louisiana agricultural industry began discussing avenues for relief.
 
To help recoup some of the sunken costs of the 2023-24 season, Hanks and several of the state’s political representatives in Washington, D.C. lobbied the United States Department of Agriculture for support. After some time spent explaining the crawfish business to administrators with limited understanding of this highly regional crop, they succeeded. 
 
“They were at least willing to try to understand a commodity that’s really foreign to them,” Hanks said. “It’s so unique. It’s regional, but it’s grown into a multi-million dollar economic boost to the state of Louisiana.” 
 
For the USDA to be receptive to the plight of crawfish farmers is a relatively new development. Crawfish was first recognized as a crop by the agency during the COVID-19 pandemic, marking the first time farmers were eligible for the Emergency Assistance for Livestock, Honey Bees, and Farm-raised Fish or ELAP program. 
 
This year will be the first time they will be eligible as a result of a natural disaster, Hanks said, referring to the intense drought of 2023. Senator John Kennedy, who helped advocate for the assistance, proposed a law that would ensure crawfish farmers’ permanent inclusion in the program.
 
Just how much money will flow into Louisiana through the program remains to be seen. The amount of assistance each individual farmer receives is determined by the size of their farm and how much crawfish they were able to harvest despite the challenging conditions. 
 
But one thing is certain, Hanks said: the federal aid will have a significant impact on the individual farms and the state’s economy as a whole in what he called a “domino effect” of relief. “It’s going to make a tremendous impact on our local economies, the ag economy, vendors that support them,“ he said. “In no way is it going to make people whole as if they had a normal harvest and season, but it’s going to be a tremendous shot in the arm.” 
 
Crawfish farmer and processor Don Benoit said he has already applied for the relief program after a devastating season for his crawfish business. Over the past season, his 2,000 acres produced a small fraction of his yearly average, Benoit said, eventually leading him to give up on harvesting altogether.
 
The federal aid will help recoup some of the costs of trying to produce a crop that eventually ended up failing, he noted. As for this upcoming season, he’s hoping that Mother Nature will help out and that crawfish will make a return under better conditions. 
 
“They’re very resilient and sometimes they come back on their own. I’m hoping that’s going to happen,” Benoit said. And while he’s not exactly hoping for a hurricane, a little tropical depression in the fall probably wouldn’t hurt, he added. “That’s when we need the water,” he said. “Those are the months that make the season.
 
And predictions for this summer suggest that his optimism is well founded. While forecasters predict another swelteringly hot summer, they also expect significantly more rainfall. That spells good news for crawfish farmers. “We can probably survive the heat as long as we have enough rain,” Shirley said. 
 
Some farmers will be limited in how much they can seed and some fields will likely be out of rotation for a season, Shirley pointed out, but eventually, experts agree, the industry will find its footing again. 
 
“Last year is last year, we’re going to leave it behind,” Hanks said. “I think we can recover in a crop cycle.”