Louisiana’s beleaguered crawfish industry will be getting help in the form of low-interest loans from the U.S. Small Business Administration, SBA Administrator Isabel Casillas Guzman announced Thursday.
The agency will issue low-interest loans for the crawfish industry, including farmers, harvesters, pickers, wholesalers, boilers, retailers, restaurants, grocery stores, equipment suppliers and others impacted by recent weather, said U.S. Rep. Troy Carter said in an interview.
Read MoreThe U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) will invest about $138 million of financial assistance from President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act—the largest climate investment in history—in 138 new climate-smart conservation easements, through which farmers and ranchers are conserving wetlands, grasslands and prime farmlands. These selected Agricultural Conservation Easement Program (ACEP) projects are part of a broad investment in climate-smart agriculture and forestry as part of President Biden’s Investing in America agenda.
Read MoreThe Louisiana Farm Bureau is working with Texas Farm Bureau and Oklahoma Farm Bureau and other organizations to provide aid to ranchers who lost cattle, fencing, forage and barns to the wildfires in their respective states.
According to published reports, the Smokehouse Creek wildfire burned more than 1.1 million acres in Texas and wildfires in Oklahoma burned an additional 300,000 acres.
Read MoreChad Tallent is a third-generation farmer growing rice, soybeans, and corn in Prairie County, Ark. He has farmed his entire life on the same ground as his father and grandfather – just four miles west of Des Arc. But around five years ago, Tallent encountered a destructive problem that was new to the family farm.
Feral hogs began to plunder, and Tallent quickly realized the importance of management to prevent his crops from becoming an endless buffet for the invasive species.
Read MoreClick below for the market report from the latest Tiger Lake Livestock Auction.
Read MoreClick below for the market report from the latest Red River Livestock Auction.
Read MoreClick below for the market report from the latest Kinder Livestock Auction.
Read MoreAt this time of year, most Louisianans are used to gathering with family and friends to enjoy steaming trays of boiled crawfish. But this year, with the harvest devastated by drought, crawfish are hard to find and costly, putting a damper on our seasonal festivities.
While consumers lament the high prices, the impact on crawfish farmers is downright dire. The fallout from searing temperatures and dry weather in August is being felt in all parts of the state, producing fewer and smaller-than-usual mudbugs this year.
Read MoreIriel Edwards is a first-generation farmer from Louisiana. In her short tenure as a farmer, Edwards, 25, has already seen extreme drought, freezes, flooding and excessive heat.
Edwards, along with thousands of other growers across the country, faces a conundrum nearly every growing season: how to stay afloat when shifting weather patterns caused by climate change keep wrecking their crops?
Read MoreThe ever-evolving framework of ag technology provides near-limitless resources for farmers looking to improve their efficiency and production down to a finite level – that is, if they can figure out how to work the darn stuff. And, even for students of the land educated beyond the school of hard knocks a father or father figure could provide, the pool of resources is just deep and dark enough to sink rather than swim.
Self-proclaimed “tech nerd” and Louisiana farmer Mead Hardwick of Hardwick Planting Co. has integrated a series of up-and-coming technologies on-farm over the years, starting with a family foundation.
Read MoreAlthough Texas crawfish farmers emerged from a challenging growing season slightly better off than producers in Louisiana, 2024 is shaping up to be a dismal crawfish season for producers and consumers alike, according to a Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service expert.
Todd Sink, Ph.D., AgriLife Extension aquaculture specialist and director of the AgriLife Extension Aquatic Diagnostics Lab, Bryan-College Station, said that while both states dealt with severe drought and record-breaking temperatures, Louisiana, the nation’s top crawfish producer, also had to contend with the added impacts of disease and invasive species.
Read MoreA public hearing concerning a possible land leveling ordinance has been scheduled Thursday, March 14 during the monthly Police Jury meeting.
If the ordinance passes, land owners would have to obtain permits before they level their land.
Read MoreThe Center for Biological Diversity announced that the reward for information regarding the illegal killing of a Whooping Crane in Mamou is now $15,000.
Officials with the Center for Biological Diversity said the juvenile whooping crane was found dead on Jan. 9 in an agricultural pond near Besi Lane in Mamou.
Read MoreThe USDA has finalized its new Product of the U.S.A. labeling rule for meat, poultry, and eggs.
Joe Maxwell, co-founder of Farm Action, says the rule is good news for America’s farmers and ranchers. “It was a great day to be in the room when the Secretary announced that America’s farmers and ranchers can be assured that only their meat products, those born, raised, slaughtered, and processed in the United States, will bear that American flag and that proud name Product of the USA,” he says.
Read MoreWith lower commodity prices and high input costs, growers will face difficult economic decisions in 2024.
Current cotton-to-corn and cotton-to-soybean price ratios are more favorable this year, but these prices may not be high enough to cover all production expenses. Given the financial pressures across the industry, the importance of a strong safety net cannot be overstated.
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