DUSON, La. (KLFY) -- Recently Gov. Jeff Landry sent a letter to the U. S. Department of Agriculture seeking federal assistance concerning the crawfish industry.
News 10 spoke with a local crawfish producer, Chad Hanks, who shared the reality of what crawfisherman are facing.
“Where we are right now, historically, we should be catching a certain volume of crawfish and we may be at 10%,” said Hanks. “It really does pain the industry and a lot of the growers. We pride ourselves on the fact that we've grown this industry to meet consumer demand and it really should be in a normal year where supply starts building and prices go down and demand starts building but we're in a totally unprecedented level that we're not sure what we have looking forward.”
He said in the last ten years he has grown his operation but his family has been in the business for over 30 years. Crawfish producers have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars hoping to catch crawfish this season but received little back.
“We're down a little bit because I think demand hasn't grown into these levels of pricing. So we're still not catching volume, but Farmgate value historically right now should be way less than it is. But the bottom line is we have no volume coming out,” Hanks said. “We put them [boat] in a pond that normally produces maybe 50 sacks of crawfish. We'll be lucky to be taking out three. The economics are just way out of proportion.”
Hanks said moving forward, being that the drought is definitely something that was historically never seen before, farmers will have to make judgment calls on if they want to make alternative routes.
“What I really want people to understand is with the amount of money that people have invested in these ponds, any kind of avenue of relief is not going to make them whole. It may give them the ability to survive and regroup and move forward, looking into next year, hoping that we can produce that abundant supply of crawfish that makes prices affordable and allows consumers to enjoy it,” Hanks explained.
Fortunately, Hanks said he’s also a sugarcane farmer but most people in the Southwest are historically rice and rotational crawfish farmers who's economics rely on a bountiful crawfish harvest. He said without that, it's going to put a lot of agriculture in a pretty bad position.
“We hope that the consumer knows that and I think the industry is just as depressed and upset with where we are with markets but there's really nothing that you know when Mother Nature stepped in this year, it threw a blow to all of us. So the one thing I would say is hopefully as we move into the next year, we can see some type of semblance of a normal cycle of crawfish production, getting it to the consumer; that’s so important to us,” Hanks said.
