Cajun Crawfish Pie
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Crawfish Farming
How do you farm for crawfish? You buy an underwater tractor and a swimming pool to load them into. Before that happens, you need to make sure that you planted plenty of crawfish seeds three months earlier, and that you fed them Tabasco (or any other fine Cajun seasonings) at least once a week. Tired of the silly joke? OK, let's talk about crawfish farming.
Just think about it. Crawfish live just about everywhere, but it's not very efficient to stick traps in every ditch and bayou. Sure, many Cajuns do very well by fishing certain areas like the Atchafalaya, but we need a more efficient method to keep up with the demands of all of the hungry crayfish (yes, the dumb Yankee word for them) fans. We need a way to raise millions of pounds of the little suckers in a fairly small area so that we can pull them out of the water at a minimal expense. Since more crawfish are produced and eaten than any other crustacean, we need to pull a lot of the mud bugs out of the water as quickly as possible. It makes perfect sense, so Cajuns came up with crawfish farming to make it happen.
If you were going to set up a crawfish farm, where would you place it. First of all, I can tell you that it will most likely be in Louisiana. How do I know that? Because out of the 150,000 acres that are used for farming crawfish in the US, over 125,000 of them are in Louisiana. Since you are going to place your farm in Louisiana (good choice!), exactly where are you going to place it? Since the average annual harvest in the US is over 100,000,000 pounds, you are going to need some serious space! Well, maybe just enough space to get a little piece of the crawfish pie. So where should it be?
We know that crawfish like to eat decomposing plants, small fish, algae, and insect. The love shallow waters that are warm. They prefer for the waters to be between 65 and 85 degrees F., and they will go dormant at temperatures below 45 degrees F. If the water temperature goes above 88 degrees F., the suckers will dig down and hide in the mud. So that means that we need some land in Louisiana that is fairly shallow, full of plants that will decompose, and not too cold (as if it EVER gets cold in Louisiana!). Our little tasty buddies also like to have something to hide by so that the birds can't find them. Where could we put our farm?
It turns out that the most common location of a crawfish farm is in a rice field. Why would that be the most likely location for our farm? Because a rice field provides everything that the crawfish need. They have plenty of water, it's shallow, the plants growing in the water keep them fed, and they use the grasses and plants to hide from predators. This also works out really well for the rice farmers. Instead of depending on the income from one crop (rice), they can spread their liability by adding a second or third one (crawfish). The additional costs for rice farmers are extremely minimal since they already have the land, levies, pumps, and irrigation systems in place, and the cash supplied from the crawfish can actually make their farms profitable. It's the perfect fit!
As you can see from the above picture, rice farms provide a great location for crawfish farming. They are flat, covered with water very easily, and they make for the perfect habitat for our little mud loving friends! Since the average farm will yield 700 to 1,000 pounds of crawfish per year, that's a lot of gold hiding under the water!