While crops like corn and rice are seeing a good harvest this year, Louisiana Agriculture Commissioner Mike Strain estimates it will take years for the state crawfish industry to bounce back from last year’s historic drought. Strain says the effects of the drought won’t be fixed in a day.
“I think you’re going to see struggles in the crawfish market probably from two to three to four, five years,” he explains.
About 100 thousand acres of crawfish farms in Louisiana were lost to the drought, slamming the 700 million-dollar state crawfish industry. Strain says while the Agriculture and Forestry Commission plans for almost any disaster a farmer could face, they were blindsided by last year’s drought, which reduced levels of pond water to between 18 to 24 inches.
“It would cover for heat, it would cover for hurricanes, but it never anticipated for a pond-raised organism that you would have a drought that would dry up the ponds,” he says.
Strain says the state Agriculture and Forestry Commission is working with the federal Department of Agriculture to provide relief for eligible farmers. Still, he says, it will likely take years to rebuild the crawfish industry after a drought that so many were unprepared for.
“I think you’re going to see a tight supply, strong prices, good prices in crawfish,” he explains. “But it’s going to take a few years. We built this crawfish industry over really a generation. This is the first time we’ve had such a drought.”
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