Crawfish prices soaring after last year’s drought wiped out most of the harvest

Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.

---

As he rattles along the highway between Houston and Louisiana in his 2003 white Dodge truck, Thomas Rozelle is fielding back-to-back phone calls about all the dead crawfish. He can barely keep up with every conversation. Restaurant owners are freaking out, farmers are panicking, all the while Rozelle — a 30-year-old crawfish wholesaler from Pasadena — is trying to keep his head straight.

Three days earlier, the price of crawfish dropped from around $8.50 per pound to $6.50 per pound. Now, suddenly, the price jumped again. Back to $8.50. It’s a bad time to buy, but Rozelle is already on his way to his crawfish dealers in Louisiana — having left Pasadena as the sun began to peak over the horizon.

By the end of the day, Rozelle will go to four crawfish spots to supply his clients back in the Houston area. He won’t get home until 9 or 10 at night. Then, in a couple days, he’ll go and do the whole trip again. This crawfish season, which typically runs anywhere from November to the end of July, he’s traveling to Louisiana less, but hitting more spots than usual when he’s there.

Last summer’s drought dried up the crawfish supply, leaving farmers, restaurant owners and wholesalers like Rozelle struggling to meet the demands of the crawfish industry. What Rozelle could usually get at one crawfish farm in Louisiana, he now needs to go to four to five spots to purchase the same amount or less.

“It’s like the stock market crash for crawfish,” he said.

Rozelle is dragging a big white trailer behind his truck, so he’s only going about 55 mph. He cracks open an energy drink from the front seat.

“I don’t mean to be that intense about it, but, like, this isn’t looking good, and we’re all barely making it.”

Texas is the number two producer of crawfish in the United States, turning out about 7.5 million pounds a year. Meanwhile, in Louisiana, annual production reaches closer to 150 million pounds a year due to expansive crawfish habitat in the southern parts of the state. Because of this, about 60 to 70 percent of crawfish consumed in Texas comes from Louisiana — meaning wholesale dealers who purchase from farmers and distribute to Houston restaurants drive miles every week during crawfish season.

This season, however, crawfish production is less than 5 percent of what production would normally be. Last year’s drought, which carried record-breaking temperatures throughout Texas and Louisiana, dried up and cracked the typically wet soil that crawfish depend upon to reproduce and survive. Last year, crawfish farmers harvested around 100 30-pound sacks of crawfish per 1,000 acres in early February. Now, farmers are only getting about eight to ten sacks per 1,000 acres.

So Rozelle, who normally takes 4,000 to 6,000 pounds of crawfish back to Houston, is scrambling to even find 500 pounds for a whole day’s work. A fraction of his usual get. This season, he’s even gone back to working a second job in construction on the side to make ends meet.

“I should’ve known, too,” he said.

Last summer, when the wholesaler was driving between Texas and Louisiana for crawfish work, he said there wasn’t a cloud in the sky and not a drop in the soil. It was around 115 degrees.

“I was thinking, ‘This ain’t good,’” Rozelle said. “This is not going to be a good season.”

Dead in the ground

As freshwater crustaceans, crawfish — also commonly called a crayfish or crawdad — look like a mix between a wet cockroach and a tiny lobster. Most commercial crawfish are raised in rice paddies in Texas and Louisiana — where farmers will alternate between rice and crawfish.

In early summer, these commercial crawfish will burrow around 20 to 40 inches into the soil and make themselves a little, watery home for the next few months to avoid the heat.

As they dig, the top of the hole is plugged up with clay — keeping moisture locked in. However, last summer, the heat was so intense that the hole’s plug cracked and the heat dried up the crawfish’s new home. Without water, the crawfish dies.

Mark Shirley, a crawfish specialist at Louisiana State University’s Agricultural Center, said female crawfish will mate first and then burrow. At the end of the summer, the females come out with babies. The heat changed that.

“As long as there’s a little water at the bottom of the burrow, the habitat can stay humid for the crawfish,” Shirley said. “But once they’re dead, there goes our broodstock that could’ve provided lots of baby crawfish to populate the pond in the fall.”

The fields are normally flooded with 12 to 18 inches of water in March when the rice is planted. The previous season’s unsold crawfish are dumped in for reproduction.

The fields are then drained for rice harvesting as the crawfish dig their little burrows. In October, when the crawfish should be coming up, the farmers flood their fields again for the mature crawfish and their babies.

“Because of the drought, farmers had to pump a lot of water into the fields in October for the crawfish to reenter the pond,” Shirley said. “Unfortunately, these farmers don’t know the crawfish are dead and spend time and money on only a few survivors.”

Because of this, farmers are especially strapped for cash and worried now that they have less crawfish to sell and to fill the fields for next season. If this summer is also a drought, crawfish production will be pushed back even more.

This is all being felt by David Scheufens, the manager at Bocage Crawfish — a rice and crawfish farming operation in Crowley, Louisiana. Scheufens, who has been in the crawfish business since 1992, is Rozelle’s first stop.

At around noon, Rozelle jumps from his truck and meets Scheufens at the main facility, which is equipped with freezers, a crawfish scale and a cooker. Bocage has thousands of acres of rice paddy fields. One field, only fifty acres, is just down the road from where the two men stood. They head over to check out the farm and see how many crawfish there are today.

“Mother Nature will throw you a curveball, and you have to deal with what’s at hand,” said Scheufens, scanning the rice paddy field. Originally from Louisiana, Scheufens has a slight southern drawl. He’s been at Bocage for a year.

“And this is one of those things. There’s just a lot of people in the industry that depend on that. Day-laborers, the bait guys, the sack guys, everyone with their fangs and eyes on it for income.”

Today, there aren’t any bags for Rozelle from Scheufens. Scheufens has to sell to the big dealers first and then he sells what’s left to wholesalers like Rozelle. The market generally sets the crawfish price per pound — which is why the price jumps around so much. Last year, the price per pound was closer to $4 or $5. Since then, it’s doubled.

“I’m not a big dog just yet,” Rozelle said to Scheufens. Even through tense times, farmers and sellers still laugh with each other a bit.

Some farmers like Scheufens still have hope in the season. Sentiments are thrown around about Mother Nature being slow or the crawfish not poking up yet. There’s still time to save the season, maybe.

Still, Scheufens jokes.

“It’s like the crawfish apocalypse over here.”

At the corner

Rozelle grew up in Pasadena, surrounded by the petrochemical industry and the Houston Ship Channel. First he traveled around a lot as a catalyst tech at plants in Pasadena and Louisiana. He’d wear a hazmat suit and clean up toxic chemicals.

He had started when he was 19 and worked there until he was 23. Later, he was employed as a superintendent for the highway department for a couple years, but eventually he left to work with his uncle at a seafood company.

After three years, he parted ways to start his own business selling crawfish.

“I started off just selling shrimp and fish in parking lots and stuff, and then crawfish season came around and it was that kind of crazy we crave,” Rozelle said. “I mean, in the places I grew up and the way I grew up, it was like second nature to hustle like this. I love it.”

Part of what wholesalers like Rozelle do is tell buyers that they have better crawfish than the next person — however, Rozelle said he’d never undercut a friend on price. He’ll just say “I got the biggest and best crawfish out there,” which Rozelle himself believes.

Before he hits up his second stop in Louisiana, he gets a bite to eat at Don’s Specialty Meats: some boudin and cracklin. He grabs a boudin ball for his wife, Cynthia, who is pregnant. Between the two, they have six children and stepchildren with the oldest being seven years old.

This adds pressure to Rozelle’s work in the crawfish industry. He’s hoping to buy a new house with a new kid on the way. The current place is getting cramped.

When he told his kids he was doing a crawfish run, he said they all got excited.

“They were running around getting their brother and sister’s orders,” Rozelle said. “What do you want? How many pounds?”

For crawfish workers like Rozelle, another blistering summer is a major concern. Climate can throw the entire operation into a downward spiral — just like this year. Some of the farmers still remember 1999 and 2000, which were significant drought years for Louisiana and Texas.

Experts expect that climate change will increase temperatures in Texas and Louisiana in the coming decades, and droughts are likely to be more severe over time. Last summer’s drought, along with the heat and drought in 2022, brought record–breaking heat throughout both states.

However, Shirley with LSU said it’s hard to determine if this is exactly climate change or just the climate cycling through its patterns.

“Maybe these drought conditions are part of a long-term trend and we’ll see it happening more frequently in the next ten to twenty years,” he said. “But, in the past, we have had drought years and we’ve had cycles of wet years. One event does not mean climate change, but in a decade we may see a pattern of drought over time.”

At the end of January, Congressman Clay Higgins of Louisiana requested financial relief from the United States Department of Agriculture due to the 2023 drought. After the 2021 freeze, farmers received relief from the USDA because of the impact it had on crawfish production. So far, the federal government has not provided any aid due to the drought.

“Because it’s hard to tell how many crawfish are surviving, it’s difficult for the USDA to come up with a standard procedure for offering assistance,” Shirley said.

At the second stop on Rozelle’s trip, at a restaurant called Crawfish Corner in Opelousas, he buys three sacks of crawfish from owner Mitch Olivier per an earlier agreement. Since he’s not there, Jun Demouchet takes over. Demouchet, 54, who works behind the counter, grabs the sacks from the freezer. At the same time, he puts a bag of crawfish in a boiler in the back and gets smaller orders for customers who just came in.

The price for restaurant customers is $12 per pound. Last year, it was $6. The price for wholesalers is still $8.50.

A half hour later, more wholesale customers show up to Crawfish Corner from Long Beach, Mississippi — having driven three hours west to pick up crawfish. They get five sacks from Demouchet. Since crawfish season began, the Mississippi crew drives to Louisiana for catch at least three times a week. They recognize Rozelle, too. The industry spans far and wide, but the community is close-knit.

“Everyone from Texas and Mississippi travels far for these sacks,” Demouchet said. “It’s just usual for our spot.”

The three sacks look small in Rozelle’s large trailer — which he says in a typical year is packed with crawfish. He’s hoping he’ll get more at the next two locations before he heads home for the day. Then he’ll distribute to his Houston customers the next morning before probably heading out to Louisiana again.

When he hops back in his truck, he’s on the phone again — someone else asking him about prices and crawfish dying and the drought last summer.

“It’s a madhouse,” he said. “But you gotta do what you gotta do.”

A crawfish boil

On a Sunday morning in mid-February, about two weeks after his drive to Louisiana, Rozelle delivers sacks of crawfish to restaurants throughout the Houston area. He starts around 8 a.m. and ends at noon with Cock-A-Doodle Crawfish and Catering, delivering 200 pounds to owners Amanda Deek and Brandy Patkowski.

The two women spend their weekends working the pop-up on top of their full-time jobs on weekdays. Today, they are outside Wakefield Crowbar, a bar and restaurant in the Heights, selling crawfish at $13 per pound. Last year, the same amount was $8 per pound.

“Some people are just not eating crawfish this year because of the prices, they’re boycotting it,” said Deek, 34. “They’re telling me I’m going to wait and if the prices don’t drop then we’re not buying. And I keep saying it’s going to get better, like, don’t skip out on this.”

For Houstonians like Deek, crawfish isn’t a thing you skip out on. It’s a lifestyle, an addiction and a community. In Houston, especially, crawfish can be a celebration of a new season and a way to get together with friends and family. In the past few years, the popularity of crawfish has surged, according to Deek. She thinks some of that may be because of the pandemic.

“After Covid, people really missed being with each other and having community,” she said. “And some people are still buying from us because they get it, they get the drought and they get that this is an operation where everyone works together.”

Two weekends ago, the price to buy crawfish wholesale was at $10. Now it’s down to $6.50. Everyone gets that prices can change in a split second. But Rozelle doesn’t think the prices will go up again until Easter or Mother’s Day when the industry takes advantage of the holidays.

Even so, Deek and Patkowski didn’t start the pop-up until February when they usually begin in December — which was rough on business. But they have hope in the industry as a whole, especially those like Rozelle who come through for customers in Houston even when the crawfish numbers are low.

The wholesaler, who has been working nonstop the past seven days, is finally ready to go home to spend time with his family. Monday is a whole new day, whole new prices. Before he leaves, he eats a platter of crawfish and live streams a review on Facebook. He rates Cock-A-Doodle crawfish a ten out of ten.

At Wakefield Crowbar, the weather this past weekend was sunny with a slight chill. Residents who stopped by for a beer also had platters of crawfish. Deek is beaming as she stirs her steaming, boiling pot of crawfish. This is her fifth year in the business.

“Days like this, you feel good about it all,” Deek said. “We’re a community and we won’t leave anyone behind if we can.”

Disclosure: Facebook has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

---

We can’t wait to welcome you to downtown Austin Sept. 5-7 for the 2024 Texas Tribune Festival! Join us at Texas’ breakout politics and policy event as we dig into the 2024 elections, state and national politics, the state of democracy, and so much more. When tickets go on sale this spring, Tribune members will save big. Donate to join or renew today.