Winter freeze deals hit to crawfish farmers
Lost time during critical season adds to businesses’ struggles
Crawfish farmers and restaurants across Texas looking for a much-needed boost to their pandemic-impacted businesses were given another blow by the winter freeze.
Instead of continuing early harvests to kick off the short and hectic Texas crawfish season, farmers including Jake Tortorice III at the Bayou Best Crawfish Farm in Sour Lake are finding dead adolescent crawfish and empty traps.
Tortorice said the weather has cut his typical harvest by about 80 percent at this point and the cold water temperatures in his ponds will probably mean those numbers won’t improve anytime soon.
“We haven’t found any major die-off of adult crawfish, but the problem is we aren’t seeing any at all,” he said. “They’ve gone into the mud, almost like hibernation, trying to conserve energy after the cold.”
The harvest in Texas is usually about 20 to 23 weeks long depending on how long it takes the hot weather to drive the crustaceans back into the mud.
Farmers could be looking at losing almost 3 weeks of that critical time and profit.
Crawfish don’t just disappear when the season is over, but — whether farmers like it or not — Tortorice said there is no extending the season due to the planting cycle for the animals’ main source of nutrition: rice.
“If I fish longer, I can’t plant rice and that means I don’t have a season next year,” Tortorice said. “We are stretching our season as far as we can stretch it.”
In the meantime, farmers still have to pay their hands, suppliers and leases just like any other season, but without the same relief given to other commodity farmers after disasters.
Crawfish farmers aren’t covered by relief programs from state and federal agriculture agencies and aren’t able to insure their crops due to the risk and inability to accurately value yearly harvest.
All of that added cost and lack of supply is pushing crawfish to around $4.50 a pound at the moment, which Tortorice said is never good for sales.
Initial estimates released Tuesday by Texas A&M University reports that the storm dealt at least a $600 million hit to the state’s agricultural industries.
“A large number of Texas farmers, ranchers and others involved in commercial agriculture and agricultural production were seriously affected by Winter Storm Uri,” Jeff Hyde, AgriLife Extension director at Bryan-College Station, said in the report “Freezing temperatures and ice killed or harmed many of their crops and livestock as well as causing financial hardships and operational setbacks. And the residual costs from the disaster could plague many producers for years to come.”
Among the state’s largest commodity losses were $230 million in damage for citrus crops, $228 million in livestock and $150 million to vegetables.
The same issues keeping farmers out of the black also stand to trickle down to the restaurants and bars that a lot of Texans rely on for their crawfish fix.
Mike Bingham, a wholesaler and master of the crawfish boil that got his start catching the ditch delicacies himself, would normally be opening up RedTailz Crawfish with some of the better catches of the early season until the larger crawfish start arriving in late March.
Instead, he’s using the last of his fresh reserves and searching his own ponds for enough crawfish to satisfy customers while he waits to see how his suppliers in Texas and Louisiana will be impacted.
“I guess the best I can do is try to find more suppliers and hope my ponds catch well,” he said. “I’ve got to feed the restaurant first, because that’s where I got my start.”
Even larger restaurant operations that source large quantities of crawfish from multiple local suppliers are worried about what a depressed crawfish season will mean for them.
Frankie Randazzo, a restaurateur and venue owner, said crawfish season has become increasingly important for six of his locations in Southeast Texas and Louisiana, bringing in groups and families for a fun night out.
Normally, the restaurant group tries to limit serving crawfish at places like Madison’s in Beaumont to just a few months out of the year to keep it special, but Randazzo said he started deals in December in hopes of generating some business.
“Between the pandemic and hurricanes, we’ve lost almost every holiday in the past year,” he said. “I thought we needed some positivity and something for people to enjoy.”
But, if the freeze continues to drive up prices and impact supplies, that will mean less profitability and less demand from consumers.