Crawfish Farming in Crowley Louisiana

Just outside Crowley, rice capital of the world in Southwest Louisiana.

Crawfishing is very prominent in this part of the country, in the right rice fields of Southwest Louisiana and also in the basin of Louisiana which is swampy area. And we’ll start crawfishing. We’ll flood up the rice field after we've harvested the rice in August. We’ll start, we’ll let vegetation grow back after we harvest the rice and will start flooding the fields back up around the first of October.

We do have rice, soybeans and crawfish in this part of South Louisiana and where we have rice this year we’ll have a crawfish crop after that and then a soybean crop after that. So really you’re getting three crops in two years. And then the next year it will go back to rice where you had soybeans.

All work off of a little 25 horsepower engine where several hydraulic motors on it to propel, you know, propel the boat and then, the steering is also—works hydraulically like a rudder on an airplane. You want to turn to the right, you press the right rudder, you want to turn to the left, left rudder. And it’s really at least you're hands free to do, picking up the trouts, emptying them out but then you bait in, that leaves your hands free, you don’t steer with your hands.

The crawfish will literally eat everything that’s out here. If they have a lot of crawfish out here, they will eat all the vegetation, all the little fish, all the worms, they’ll just eat literally anything that’s out here. They like certain things, they’ll eat on that first and then when that’s gone they go to something else. But this field, you can see all the vegetation out here, come May and June all you’ll see is water if you have crawfish. If you don’t had any crawfish naturally that vegetation will just stay but eventually it will rot in the water also with the other vegetation. But the crawfish will literally eat everything that’s out there.