Crawfish Season Winds Down as Next Year’s Crop Begins
By Karl Wiggers
Louisiana Farm Bureau News
As crawfish season comes to a close across south Louisiana, farmers like Jonathan Fontenot in Evangeline Parish are already thinking about next year’s catch.
At least for K&K Ag Partnership where he works, Fontenot says the season has been a good one.
“You know, you had your ups and downs across the farm,” Fontenot said. “You'll never have a homerun every time, but, overall, satisfied.”
Crawfish is just part of the picture on Fontenot’s farm. His family also grows rice, rotating the two crops every year.
“Everything we farm is on a two-year rotation,” he explained. “What we have planted in rice this year will be crawfish acres next year. What’s in crawfish acres this year will be rice next year. They go hand-in-hand.”
While most people are winding down from the busy crawfish season, Fontenot’s crew is ramping up for next year’s crop through a process known as seeding. Using the same boats and traps they’ve been fishing with all season, they collect small crawfish to be relocated into the rice fields that will become next season’s crawfish ponds.
“Our guys start fishing at about six in the morning,” said Fontenot. “All of our crawfish get back to headquarters and get sorted through. We split them up—big crawfish, which will hit the road, and small crawfish, which will be seed stock.”
Once sorted, Fontenot’s team loads the trucks with sacks of crawfish destined for the rice fields, sometimes as many as 130 sacks a day.
“It’s essentially an investment into next year’s crop,” he said. “You have to invest into next year’s crop in order to get a good crop next year.”
With the rice crop already in the ground and approaching harvest, the seed crawfish are placed into the flooded rice fields, where they’ll eventually burrow and reproduce.
“In that time, the crawfish will go and burrow—typically in the exterior perimeters of the field, levees and roads,” Fontenot explained. “They burrow down into the soil, lay eggs, incubate, and lay dormant there from the months of July until October.”
Once fall arrives, Fontenot floods the fields again, bringing the new generation of crawfish back to the surface.
“In October, we’ll flood the fields back up and these crawfish will emerge from their burrows,” he said. “From that point on, the new crop will start growing. It takes 3 to 4 months for them to be mature and start catching mature crawfish again, which leads you right into that February–March area where the crawfish catch gets pretty sweet.”
From one season to the next, it’s a cycle of hard work and careful planning, but one that ensures fresh Louisiana crawfish keep coming to tables across the state.