Crawfish Inclusion in CFAP was a Team Effort
By Avery Davidson
The Voice of Louisiana Agriculture
The United States Department of Agriculture added crawfish as one of the commodities eligible for assistance through the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program, but the addition did not come about without hard work.
“This was a full court press,” said Louisiana Farm Bureau National Affairs Coordinator Andy Brown.
Brown helped organize the Louisiana Farm Bureau Crawfish Working Group; a group comprised of crawfish farmers and others involved in the industry who volunteered their time to work with Louisiana Commissioner of Agriculture Mike Strain and the state’s congressional delegation to have crawfish added to CFAP.
“This was a true grassroots Farm Bureau effort,” Brown said. “We were heard loud and clear and thankfully we’ve yielded some results.”
The result is that USDA will pay 65 cents per pound for crawfish sold between January 15, 2020 and April 15, 2020 and 5 cents per pound for crawfish that went unsold during the same time period.
“That part we still have a little work to do to clarify exactly how you can calculate the inventory of a crawfish pond on April 15,” Brown said.
According to data collected and analyzed by the LSU AgCenter, the price of crawfish dropped 81 cents per pound due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Brown says all of the information gathering and calculation done by economists at the LSU AgCenter made a huge impact on decision makers at USDA.
“The hard work that they did to produce high quality data,” Brown said. “The LSU AgCenter really took a lot of the burden off of USDA in analyzing what can be a regionally grown and kind of niche crop in crawfish.”
Leading the charge at the congressional level were Representatives Clay Higgins from Louisiana’s 3rd district and Ralph Abraham from Louisiana’s 5th District.
“The delegation couldn’t have done it without the Louisiana Farm Bureau and great help from the LSU AgCenter,” said Abraham. “It was a combined, joint effort by a lot of entities that came together for a common goal and a common cause that we in Louisiana and throughout the south know and love and that's our crawfish people.”
Abraham sits on the House Agriculture Committee, and both he and Higgins credit the unified voice for the crawfish industry as the reason USDA included crawfish in CFAP.
“There’s no way that we could perform as a congressional office for our farmers without the support and the encouragement and the networking of Farm Bureau,” Higgins said.