Crawfish platter at Hawk’s Restaurant in Rayne, Louisiana. | Bill Addison
It’s early in the season, but optimism abounds
During springtime in Louisiana, you don’t have to go far outside your door before the smell of cayenne, garlic, and citrus hits your nostrils. This is peak crawfish boil season, when families across the state haul out their enormous crawfish cooking rigs and invite their friends over for a feast of mudbugs, potatoes, corn, and sausage, all boiled in the state’s distinct blend of Cajun spices. But in 2024, the crawfish boils were fewer and further between due to a historically bad year for the state’s crawfish producers.
Last year was, objectively, a nightmare for Louisiana’s crawfish industry. Starting in 2023, the state experienced historic drought conditions, which severely impacted the size of the crawfish crop. Some estimates suggest that the crop yield declined by as much as 90 percent. “It was a devastating year for producers, with low, low yields,” says Todd Fontenot, an agent at the Louisiana State University AgCenter. “There wasn’t enough rain for the crawfish to really get big or stay healthy and strong enough to lay their eggs.”
Like all crops, the crawfish crop is highly susceptible to drought. Some crawfish are wild-caught, but many are raised in crawfish ponds, which are essentially flooded rice paddies. There’s a symbiotic relationship between the mudbugs and the rice itself — the growing crawfish feed on the growing rice shoots, and their waste fertilizes the rice. Because of the drought’s impact on Louisiana’s water levels, wild-caught crawfish yields were down significantly. There also wasn’t enough rainfall to adequately saturate crawfish ponds. As a result, many crawfish weren’t fully able to complete their growth cycle or reproduce as they burrowed deeper into the ground to escape the heat. Others died in dry fields before they could be harvested. As a result, experts project that the Louisiana crawfish industry lost almost $140 million last year, sparking a statewide disaster declaration that enabled farmers to apply for federal disaster relief.
Because last year’s supply was so low, prices were eye-poppingly high. Wholesale prices for 50-pound sacks of crawfish topped $10 per pound, which meant that restaurant customers in Louisiana and beyond were paying as much as $19 for a pound of cooked crawfish at a restaurant (in contrast, a pound of cooked crawfish is normally between $4 and $8, depending on location). You might think those prices were beneficial for farmers struggling with low yields, but that isn’t actually the case. “People think high prices mean more money, and that’s just not the case. High prices just mean lower volume,” says Trey Broussard, who operates the Acadia Crawfish Company in Crowley, Louisiana, alongside his family. “We definitely make less money when the prices are super high. Even if you’re catching less, your costs remain the same, and you have a much higher risk-to-reward ratio.”
Ray Schlaudecker, the owner of Captain Sid’s and the operator of a wholesale crawfish business, saw an immediate decline at his restaurant in Metairie’s Bankhead neighborhood. “All people were hearing from the news media was doomsday,” says Schlaudecker. “On top of it being a bad season, people were scared to come in and eat crawfish because they thought they couldn’t afford it.” He saw his regulars paring back their visits to every couple of weeks instead of stopping in every few days, and noticed that his customers’ orders were also shrinking. Instead of buying 5 pounds of crawfish, they’d buy 2.
Schlaudecker was fortunate that his wholesale crawfish business, which sells crawfish to tourist-favorite restaurants in the French Quarter, among others, was more stable than the restaurant. As such, his business wasn’t as impacted as restaurants who really rely on crawfish boil season to get them through the spring.
When he shuttered his popular Viet Cajun restaurant Saigon House in Houston, chef Tony J. Nguyen described the crawfish shortage as the latest in a series of brutal blows for the restaurant. “We survived hurricanes and a global pandemic,” Nguyen wrote in a Facebook post announcing the closure. “Unfortunately, we could not survive the crawfish shortage of 2024.”
Fortunately, things were already looking up for 2025, even during the worst of last year. As rainfall returned to near-normal levels last summer, drought conditions subsided. A rainy fall season had farmers projecting a strong year, and even despite a freak cold snap that brought snow to the Gulf Coast in January of this year, it appears that those projections were correct. It’s still early, but optimism currently abounds among crawfish producers. “The weather has been way more optimal, we’ve had good rice crops, and we’re seeing a lot of activity in the fields,” says Broussard. “The crops are looking pretty strong, they’re getting bigger. It’s still early in the season, so the crawfish are still growing. But the ones I’ve eaten so far have been very enjoyable, very tender and juicy.”
Restaurants that serve crawfish, especially those focused on seafood boils, also struggled in 2024. Unable to pay $15 or more per pound, customers just didn’t buy as much crawfish. Some restaurant owners had to let staff go, others closed their businesses entirely, and some relied on frozen crawfish, which most customers view as subpar. At Captain Sid’s, a seafood boil stalwart in Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans, prices topped $15 per pound in the early part of the 2024 season, a rate that was practically unheard of.
And while 2025 is looking to be a banner year for crawfish, it’s likely that the coming years will bring even more uncertainty for the industry. According to an Environmental Protection Agency report, as Louisiana gets warmer, it may be more vulnerable to flooding and droughts, both of which will have an impact on future crawfish crops. Still, many folks involved in the industry were reluctant to blame 2024’s misfortunes on climate change. “Our weather patterns have definitely changed over time,” says Fontenot. “But it’s so hard to predict long-term. We’re going to see highs and lows, and we don’t want our weather pattern to change too drastically, but I think everything comes in cycles.”
For now, Schlaudecker and others involved in the crawfish industry are happy to revel a bit in the optimism after last year’s disaster. Schlaudecker says his business has been up at least 30 percent in recent weeks as customers flood in to get their crawfish fix at $4.99 per pound, boiled to spicy perfection. He expects those prices to drop even further in the coming weeks. In fact, things are so busy at Captain Sid’s right now that he’s worried that people are going to get burnt out on eating crawfish long before the season ends. “It’s back to business as usual. The docks are so full of crawfish right now that they don’t know what to do with them,” he says. “The amount of crawfish that people are eating right now, I figure they’ll be tired of it by June.”
