Weather patterns in the late summer and early fall have kept the supply high
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The 2020 crawfish season is off to a strong start, with reports of prices that are half what they were a year ago and two to three times the supply.
In Bucktown, the hub of seafood markets in Jefferson Parish by Lake Pontchartrain, Clint St. Philip, manager of Captain Sid’s Seafood, said size is still inconsistent, though he expects that to improve week to week.
“What’s really early is the price,” he said. “Last week, prices dropped 75 cents, it felt like mid-season as soon as that happened.”
According to The Crawfish App, which tracks prices, live crawfish are selling for as low as $2.29 a pound in south Louisiana, and boiled crawfish can be found for $3.49 a pound. Laney King, who co-founded the app with her husband, Ryan, said the average price a year ago for a pound of live crawfish in south Louisiana was $4.50, and boiled crawfish cost nearly $7. King said prices usually aren’t that low until Mardi Gras.
“The warm winter weather really helped crawfish to grow and farmers to catch them,” she said. In response to the ample supply and to trigger customer demand for things such as early crawfish boils, businesses are dropping prices.
Greg Lutz, a professor at the LSU AgCenter’s Aquaculture Research Station who has been studying crawfish for more than 30 years, said the weather patterns in the late summer and early fall have kept the supply high.
Crawfish eggs start to hatch in late August and the hatchlings cling to the tail of their mother for several weeks while she stays in her burrow. When a heavy rainfall happens, crawfish go out into ditches and ponds and the hatchlings disperse. “The rainfall we had got a lot of the crawfish out of the ground fairly early,” Lutz said.
Farmers are trying to maximize the yield and size of this year’s crop by selling off the early supply of crawfish. Lutz said the density in ponds determines how big crawfish can grow. “It doesn’t matter how much food you give them, if crawfish are crowded up in a pond, they’re not going to grow so well,” he said.
“A year ago, we were selling 60 to 80 sacks of crawfish a week,” said Will Boutte, the owner-manager of Capital City Crawfish in Baton Rouge, a Government Street market that also has wholesale and catering operations. “This year, live and boiled, we are selling about 250 sacks a week. We’re off to a real good start.”
While it’s still early and a lot of things could go wrong this crawfish season, like a late cold snap, Boutte said prices are on track to be the lowest in about eight years. He predicts Capital City Crawfish will sell between 800 to 900 sacks at the season’s Easter peak; last year they sold 500 to 600 sacks. “We had almost no cold weather this year, maybe three frosts, no freezes,” he said. “That’s helped out tremendously.”
At Prejean’s in Lafayette, owner Bud Guilbeau said the quantity and low prices in late January caused him to start selling boiled crawfish at the restaurant for the first time since 1995. When Prejean’s opened in 1980, it only sold boiled crawfish, crabs and shrimp, but it dropped the program because there was more demand for fried seafood and award-winning crawfish etouffee.
“Originally we were not going to start until early- to mid-February. It came out that crawfish were already good and a lot of them. I decided to pull the trigger a little early, and it’s been good so far,” he said. “We’re still trying to get the word out. Our marketing plans were all geared toward early February. We’ve been trying to get the word out as much as we can.”
Justin LeBlanc has been selling crawfish since December at Bevi Seafood Co., his combination market/po-boy shop in New Orleans, not far from City Park. He just reopened his Metairie location last week as prices have come down and supply has started shaping up.
“Things are so much better than last year,” he said. “We’re already seeing prices now that we didn’t see until Lent last year.”
Signs of a strong season are a relief for LeBlanc, who said last year was a “perfect storm” of difficulties between cold weather crimping the harvest and a late Lent pushing back the traditional high demand time for boils.
“People haven’t really started looking for it yet, they’re not having the backyard boils yet, so I think they’ll be surprised by where things are now,” he said. “It’s going to be a good Mardi Gras for boils.”
As a seasoned crawfish merchant, however, LeBlanc also knows nothing is a sure thing with a product so dependent on weather.
“We’re feeling good but you have to knock on wood because as soon as you say that there could be a cold snap.”
The LSU AgCenter’s Lutz said consumers need to enjoy the low crawfish prices while they last.
“If I could predict how crawfish prices are going to go, I wouldn’t need this job anymore,” he said. “You need to get them while the prices are good because you never know what is going to happen.”
By TIMOTHY BOONE, The Times-Picayune/ The New Orleans Advocate
