SpaceX Coming to Louisiana
By Karl Wiggers
Louisiana Farm Bureau News
For generations, agriculture has helped shape the economy, landscape and culture of Vermilion Parish. Rice fields, crawfish ponds and sugarcane farms stretch across the parish toward Louisiana’s Gulf Coast.
Now, another industry is preparing to put down roots alongside them.
SpaceX announced plans in August for Starbase Louisiana, a massive Starship launch and manufacturing complex planned for Pecan Island in southern Vermilion Parish. The company has committed a $100 billion investment on a roughly 125,000-acre site, with construction expected to begin in 2027 and the first launch targeted as soon as 2029.
At full buildout, Louisiana Economic Development says plans call for five launch complexes with two launch pads each, along with propellant farms, propellant production, employee housing and other infrastructure. The state says the project is expected to create 3,000 direct jobs over the next 10 years and estimate another 8,100 indirect jobs.
For farmers who already make their living in Vermilion Parish, the scale of the announcement brings a mixture of opportunity and uncertainty.
“Louisiana is one thing, but coming to Vermilion Parish is the biggest thing,” said Errol Domingues, a fourth-generation sugarcane farmer who also represents District 8 on the Vermilion Parish Police Jury. “The biggest economic project ever to be considered in the state is coming to fruition. This is a $100B+ project; how can we as a parish refuse it?”
Domingues said the potential economic benefits are difficult to ignore, particularly for a parish that has historically depended heavily on agriculture and the oil and gas industry.
As offshore oil and gas activity shifted toward deeper waters, Domingues said Vermilion Parish lost some of the service industry that once supported its economy. He sees the SpaceX development as an opportunity to fill part of that economic void and potentially give young people more reasons to build careers close to home.
“I think that as a whole, we're losing our young people,” Domingues said. “They're not coming into agriculture nationwide, and they're leaving our parishes, our local towns, to go to bigger areas to work. This is a way to retain those people in the culture they were brought up in and not move out.”
But Domingues also acknowledges development on this scale will bring changes.
“There'll be some development areas where agriculture is going to be affected, and people's livelihoods are going to be affected,” he said. “But we as a parish have to find a way to embrace those things and make it happen to where it's the least impactful to our society, with the biggest economic benefit that's possible.”
Farming alongside a new industry
Those questions become more immediate farther south in Vermilion Parish.
John McLain farms rice and crawfish in the area. Like many farmers, McLain's operation depends on relationships with landowners who rent or share acreage with farmers.
That makes the arrival of a major new industry something he is watching closely.
“You want to be optimistic, but of course, you're kind of cautious about it because of the influx of large corporations,” McLain said. “You know, more money is coming. It's hard for agriculture to compete with any industry that's above them, just because we have a lot of factors and variables that we have to make ends meet.”
McLain said one of the difficulties is trying to imagine what the parish will look like years from now when so many details are still developing.
“That's the problem that I'm struggling with the most because I can't see 10 or 15 years ahead,” McLain said. “You try to imagine what it is now and what it could be changing to. That's a difficult thing.”
His conclusion, at least for now, is that farmers will have to adapt.
“There's no stopping it,” McLain said. “So you have to try and adapt to it and work with it and hope for the best.”
Christian Richard, another Vermilion Parish rice and crawfish farmer, is thinking about some of the same changes at an even more practical level.
Rice and crawfish production relies on a network of irrigation wells, pipelines, drainage systems and field infrastructure. Richard said changes to roads or other infrastructure could have consequences extending well beyond the ground physically occupied by new development.
“When you start looking at some of our farm infrastructure, pipe drops, and drainage, the way that these fields are flooded, a lot of that's going to be manipulated,” Richard said. “So we all need to have a seat at the table and address these things before they become major issues for us to overcome.”
Richard said some of his family's infrastructure runs close to existing highways, including irrigation pipelines and deep-water wells. Without knowing exactly what future transportation corridors or road improvements will look like, he said it is difficult for farmers to know what changes they should prepare for.
“I think the biggest problem with everything that's going on is the fear of the unknown,” Richard said. “Nobody really knows what to expect.”
That uncertainty extends beyond agriculture. SpaceX and Louisiana officials have announced the broad scope of Starbase Louisiana, but many details will still depend on design, permitting, environmental review and infrastructure planning as the project moves toward construction.
Looking for opportunity
The farmers are not only considering what they could lose or must change. They are also looking for ways agriculture could benefit from a new population and billions of dollars in economic activity coming into the region.
For McLain, one opportunity is easy to imagine: crawfish.
“Man, we gotta fill all these restaurants with crawfish and try and get a fair price for our product that we have,” McLain said. “This may draw a lot of tourists to the area and new people coming in. We can share the crawfish with them and they're going to take the word back with them and spread the word.”
He sees the same potential for other products grown and raised in Vermilion Parish.
“It's not just the crawfish,” McLain said. “It's all of Vermilion Parish's agricultural commodities, you know, the rice, the beef, the sugarcane – all of it.”
Richard sees potential opportunities in the crawfish business as well, particularly if new jobs bring more people and disposable income into the parish.
“You may have a lot of people that won't be from here who are going to be introduced to crawfish,” Richard said. “They may have a little bit more money than this area has had in recent years, and it might make the crawfish business pick up.”
SpaceX has also said coastal protection and conservation will be part of its plans. The company says much of the 125,000-acre property will remain undeveloped, while Louisiana officials say the project will require state and federal permitting and environmental reviews. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said at the announcement that the company intends to work on marsh restoration and protection as the site is developed.
For Richard, who farms in a region familiar with hurricanes, erosion and wetland loss, that could become another potential benefit — though the specifics of those efforts remain to be seen.
“One of the things that sound really positive are some of the effects on the coastline,” Richard said. “The coast was really battered up or beaten up from these hurricanes and erosion, wetland loss and all that.”
Agriculture after Starbase
The challenge facing Vermilion Parish is not necessarily choosing between agriculture and aerospace. For the farmers already there, the more immediate question is how the two can coexist.
McLain describes his outlook as “cautiously optimistic.”
“That took some time to grow to that opinion of it because, you have other friends and families that may not be in agriculture that are going to directly benefit from this, and that's good for them,” he said. “It might not directly benefit me. It might be the opposite. But with one thing comes and you've got to take the other. So, we'll find out what happens.”
For Domingues, the changes are both governmental and deeply personal.
His great-grandfather started the family farm. Domingues said he, his father and his brother spent decades building it. Now his sons represent another generation with a potential future in agriculture.
“I'm a fourth-generation farmer. My boys will be fifth-generation farmers,” Domingues said. “I definitely want to see it go ahead. But at the same sense, one person can't stand in the way of this, and we're going to have to adapt at whatever magnitude it is.”
Exactly what that adaptation will require is one of the questions Vermilion Parish will answer as Starbase Louisiana moves from announcement to construction.
For Domingues, adaptation itself is nothing new.
“It's a hard thing, but we've adapted as a culture in the past,” he said, “and I think that culture will stand forth and will adapt to what comes ahead of us.”