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Louisiana produces 90% of the crawfish found in the United States. Most farmed crawfish come from rice fields in one 35-square-mile area near Welsh, Louisiana.
The industry is fairly new, only entering the mainstream in the 1980s as rice farmers began experimenting with cultivating crawfish in their fields.
The experiment paid off and today business is booming, generating $300 million annually for the state's economy and clearing the way for the next generation of farmers like Madison McIntyre.
McIntyre, the founder of Parish Seafood Wholesale, says his company handles up to 4 million pounds of crawfish annually.
"I never imagined it would be to this level, nor was it our goal. It kind of just happened organically," McIntyre told Business Insider.
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Crawfish, native to the swamps and rice fields in the southeast of North America, are crustaceans related to lobsters and shrimp.
In September and October, rice farmers in Louisiana flood their fields, forcing the crawfish to come to the surface for food. This is when Parish Seafood comes in to catch them using traps.
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Workers ride through the fields in pedal-controlled boats, where they quickly grab crawfish traps, dump the crawfish into their boats, and rebait the traps in about seven seconds. The workers have to move quickly to keep the animals from dying in the intense Louisiana heat after they're removed from the water.
The crawfish are then loaded onto trucks, which transport them to a crawfish dock to be weighed and put into coolers to protect them from the heat.
The crawfish are then washed on a conveyor machine that costs $150,000 before they are placed back into the coolers.
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The company tries to sell its larger, high-grade crawfish within 12 to 24 hours after they are caught, but the process can be fickle because the business is still mostly unregulated.
"It's all pretty much done on a handshake. There's no contract," McIntyre told BI. "You have to be careful because people can buy all your crawfish at the beginning of the season and then as soon as the catch picks up they can leave you and buy from somebody else."
The smaller crawfish, McIntyre sells to himself to use in his restaurants and other products. These crawfish are sent to a separate factory to have their tail meat processed.
The crawfish are first dumped into tanks before they are washed a second time, then they are dropped into a large basket that is dropped into a huge pot of boiling water.
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After boiling, the crawfish are taken to a peeling room, where they are peeled by hand. Leona Williams, a peeler in the facility, says she has been peeling there for 50 years.
"Learned this from momma at the age of 13," Williams told BI. "Get off of school, help my mom sometimes until one in the morning."
Williams, who can peel about 40 pounds of crawfish daily, says you have to break the head off the crawfish first before pinching the tail to pull out its meat.
"Peel them well to make sure their veins are out for sure," Williams said.
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The peelers are paid about $2.50 a pound and most have to peel "pretty fast" if they want to make enough money to support themselves, Lewis says.
McIntyre says he plans to open another facility to focus on air freight, but his competition is getting stiff as crawfish farms in Louisiana have more than doubled since 2000.
Inflation has also caused McIntyre's costs to soar more than 40%, with fuel alone costing him more than $150,000 more than it did in 2022.
Much of McIntyre's 60 staff members — about 95% of them — are also working on visas, and he is on the hook for their housing and transportation. McIntyre pays his staff just over $14 an hour, double the state's minimum wage.
Parish Seafood Wholesale saw about $500,000 in profits last year, while McIntyre says he took home a salary of just $20,000, investing more than 80% back into the company.
