Crawfish Season 2020
A unique set of challenges meets the producers and distributors of Louisiana's most culturally significant crop.
There’s nothing quite like it.
Spreading pages of old newspaper along a table—or grabbing a plastic tray, if that’s your thing—and watching the steaming red contents of a boiling pot pour onto your surface of choice, riddled with garlic and spices. Armed with an Abita by your side, you take a swig before digging in, peeling off tender tail meat, and sucking the juice straight from the head.
It was the peak of this year’s crawfish season when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, a time when many South Louisiana residents would normally gather on a weekly basis for crawfish boils during the Lenten and festival season. With everyone retreating into their homes, and restaurants shuttered for the foreseeable future, the industry has taken a crippling hit over the course of just over thirty days. Because normal distributors are either closed or limited to to-go orders only, there’s a surplus of crawfish, driving the price per pound so low that a lot of farmers and processors can’t afford the labor to harvest and peel them all. There aren’t enough distributors open to push product, and the huge demand for "the big guys" only makes it more difficult for farmers to get rid of their medium-size crawfish.
In Breaux Bridge, the small town in St. Martin Parish dubbed the “Crawfish Capital of the World,” the annual Crawfish Festival—like so many others—was postponed indefinitely. Originally scheduled to take place May 1-3, the three-day event annually goes through nearly 25,000 pounds of crawfish over the course of the weekend, which sees about 30,000 attendees. “This festival, and the crawfish industry as a whole, are extremely important to our culture because it’s really a testament to who the people of our area are, our passion for life, and the camaraderie of individuals here,” said festival association president Mark Bernard.
Dustin LeBeouf’s Crowley-area crawfish farm is the product of years of hard work and long hours come to fruition. LeBeouf started farming in the early 2000s, leaving an offshore job to try his hand farming crawfish, following the same path as his dad. He’s gradually built up his operation each year, forming partnerships with different distributors and learning the ropes of the business side. This year, he’s harvesting five hundred acres of crawfish with just himself, his dad, and a few workers they bring in each year.
“I just feel it's my calling from God and I feel very blessed to be able to do it as much as I can,” LeBeouf said.
LeBeouf doesn’t have the longevity or name recognition that bigger crawfish operations do, relying on bank loans to see his crop through from season to season. So when there’s a bad crop year, he doesn’t have the cash reserves to ride it out; instead, LeBeouf has to decide if he’s willing to go further into debt in order to plant extra acreage in rice this fall—hoping he can make enough to break even. “Is that really what I want to do? No, but I know I have to figure out a way to pay all these bills, you know?” Without government assistance, LeBeouf is concerned that smaller farms like his won’t be able to recover enough to survive in the long term.
“It’s hard because you only have really five months out of the year to make your money in the crawfish operation, and it’s grind time,” LeBeouf said. “You come out of a bad rice crop and you’re depending on the crawfish, but the crawfish aren’t there for you. You've still got to figure out a way to pay everything, you know. It’s a tough game.”
When he thinks about leaving the farm as his legacy to his two young sons, LeBeouf isn't sure whether the risk is worth the reward.
“I would love to be able to do it, but I'm gonna be honest with you. It's scarier and scarier for somebody like me, and I have a lot of faith. In order for me to be able to hand it down to my children, I need to be able to be a lot more stable with where I'm at, and we’ve done nothing but grow year after year. But, there are some years where you don’t. This is one of them.
“You come out of a bad rice crop and you’re depending on the crawfish, but the crawfish aren’t there for you. You've still got to figure out a way to pay everything, you know. It’s a tough game.” —Dustin LeBeouf
“I feel that if I give up then I've accomplished nothing, but if I keep thriving, and I keep fighting the fight, I figure that one day I'm gonna pull through.”
Jeffery Sylvester has been crawfishing since he was old enough to walk in a crawfish pond. Sylvester, 61, has spent the majority of those years out in the ponds on his family’s property in Whiteville. Sylvester Crawfish Processors was established in 1980, run by the family patriarch Chester Sylvester, along with Jeffery and his three brothers, Tim, Chet, and Ted. By ‘83 they were building the processing plant, and over the years, the operation has grown to three thousand acres. Jeffery Sylvester’s three sons will be the third generation to take the reigns of the family business; two have completed college degrees—including a master’s degree in astrophysics—and returned to work the farm, while his youngest is still in college.
Sylvester employs a workforce of around forty employees to tend the ponds and run the plant. His larger-scale operation allows him to process his crawfish harvest onsite rather than having to go through a middleman. This has been crucial during the pandemic, as many proessing plants are currently being forced to work on skeletan crews due to COVID restrictions. Sylvester doesn't outsource his crawfish, so he can sell his product to distributors at a lower price per pound. Still, there are challenges.
“Usually the farmers would make real good money for the year in March and April, before Easter, and after that the price drops, and you don't sell as much crawfish,” Sylvester said. “But you’ve already made your money in those few months because that's when everybody's buying them. Well, that's not what happened this year with the coronavirus.”
For as much as Louisiana folk love crawfish, it turns out the producers providing it love it just as much. “I get a lot of people who don’t understand my sanity, they think I’m crazy because I get up every morning with a smile on my face to go to work,” Sylvester said. “I just love what I do. It's something that is in me and I have to be out here every day because this is where my sanctuary is.”
“Us being able to buy [farmers’] products supports their family; it's a mutual process. We’re relying on each other to supply a product that's so essential to who we are as Cajuns.” —Kyle Choate of Cajun Claws
Lafayette attorney Kyle Choate grew up washing dishes and waiting tables at his parents’ restaurant. Established in 1996, Donni and Jodi Choate’s Abbeville eatery, Cajun Claws, is an Acadiana institution whose praises have been sung over the years by GQ’s food critic, as well as The Times-Picayune’s former food critic, Brett Anderson, who is now a regular contributor to The New York Times. Anderson says, “Cajun Claws boiled crawfish is some of the best you’ll ever eat.” They’re also some of the biggest.
Since Cajun Claws closed its dining room in mid-March, Kyle Choate has been delivering bouts of to-go crawfish to loyal customers in Lafayette every Friday night. The weekly delivery trips have brought the Choate clan back to their roots of helping the family business however they can.
“Us being able to buy [farmers’] products supports their family; it's a mutual process. We’re relying on each other to supply a product that's so essential to who we are as Cajuns.”
“It's not like you see these people on the news, these are people from small communities. You're not going to see them on the day to day. But our business supports them. So I think that's vital in terms of how we're dealing with this as well, because nobody speaks on their behalf. They will just make do, which is what my parents are trying to do—to try to make do with what they’ve been handed.”