Climate change is hitting the heart of Cajun country—through its crawfish

Dane Powell put his name on small-town east Texas when he opened Dane’s Crawfish and More in 2020. The restaurant was an immediate hit among Kirbyville's rural population of roughly 2,000, even if COVID-19 restrictions forced them to work out of a drive-thru window.

Restaurants specializing in the freshwater crustacean and crawfish farming are common in the region. East Texas is deeply influenced by south Louisiana’s Cajun French culture—descendants of exiled colonial French Canadians. Much of the culture is passed down from ancestors who migrated across state lines. In fact, it could be argued that if Lafayette in Louisiana’s Acadiana region is the “heart of Cajun country,” then Powell’s hometown is part of its lungs.

Across the southern U.S., the Procambarus clarkiired species—known as the red swamp crawfish, crayfish, mudbugs, crawdads, or otherwise—are wild-caught in local waterways or farmed in ponds or rice fields flooded in the offseason, providing a rotational crop for farmers. The native mudbugs are culturally symbolic (Louisiana lawmakers designated crawfish as the state crustacean in 1983) and as a delicacy. Throughout the species’ harvest season spanning from November to July, millions of pounds of crawfish are boiled in Cajun spices and served in cardboard trays; in recent years, crawfish sold for as low as $2 to $3 per pound. 

But this year, prices have increased by 500 percent or more nearly region-wide.

“Right now, it's costing anywhere from $10 to $20 on the wholesale market,” Powell says.

The shock felt throughout the U.S. crawfish market is absorbed by its blue-collar producers and restaurant owners, as well as folks working in processing plants, deshelling crawfish, and delivery-truck drivers. It’s described as one of the aftermaths of last year’s drought and recent hard freezes, which forced crawfish spawn die-offs ahead of their ongoing harvest time.  

Reports from crawfish farmers concur.

“We've only had 14 days of fishing under our belt since the first of the year, totaling about 2,500 pounds,” says Zachary Hebert, a fourth-generation crawfish farmer who works at his family’s company Bonanza Crawfish in southwest Louisiana’s small-town Jennings. “I haven’t even done the numbers, to be honest, because I just don’t want to look at them.” 

“It’s terrible,” Hebert adds. 

Scientists describe the toll on crawfish as one of climate change’s impact on food systems. A recent National Climate Assessment report suggested Louisiana will experience 20 to 30 additional extreme heat days annually by 2050, mirroring more extreme effects of a heat dome the region suffered through last summer. 

For those who depend on a healthy crawfish season, this year, environmental hardships bear harsher economic consequences.  

A cultural icon 

Crawfish have been a part of the Cajun diet for generations. But the delicacy remained confined to Louisiana until AJ Judice, Jr.—the “Crazy Frenchman”—began running crawfish races in 1963 to promote his Cajun food store in southeast Texas’ Port Arthur. Later named “state crawfish racing commissioner” by Texas Governor Preston Smith, Judice’s marketing charades eventually paid off by creating a regional market for what’s, today, a burgeoning industry.

But even as crawfish’s popularity as a food has spread beyond Louisiana, its farming industry and production has largely stayed home. Louisiana produces on average 90 percent of U.S. crawfish (roughly 170 million pounds), according to the Southern Regional Aquaculture Center.

Since the 1960s, Louisiana State University Ag Center researchers noted that Louisiana crawfish farms’ acreage increased statewide from about 10,000 acres to more than 300,000 acres, said Mark Shirley, a Louisiana Sea Grant and LSU AgCenter extension agent—although about a quarter of those are unusable as saltwater levels rise. By comparison, Texas has only about 10,000 acres currently dedicated to farming crawfish, according to Texas A&M University’s AgriLife Extension Aquatic Diagnostics Lab; in Mississippi, about 300 acres, the Mississippi State University Extension Service estimates.  

(Learn more about how how climate change is threatening peaches and tomatoes.)

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The crawfish economy spills into nearby states, too. It’s what Shirley described as the Gulf’s “Cajun belt of influence,”—or “as far as a Cajun with a truckload of crawfish can drive in about 8 hours,” he says, jokingly.

In summer months, crawfish burrow two to four feet into the muddy soil. The creatures then seal off the burrows at the ground line, where crawfish will survive “so long as there is some water on the bottom of that burrow,” Shirley explains. The problem, however, is that most of the crawfish's freshwater habitat was too dry last year. 

“The number of young crawfish produced is just a fraction of what we normally have,” he says.

Drought and record heat imperil the mudbug

In September, 90 percent of Louisiana was in “extreme” drought, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Where water usually stood across south Louisiana, cracks had begun to show in drying muddy floors. In Baton Rouge—about 55 miles north of the Acadiana region’s crawfish farmers—July 2023 was the city’s hottest month on record; the following month was recorded as the driest month that year for the entire state. 

Recent cold weather spells exacerbated the strain on crawfish populations. Few crawfish eggs were able to hatch after mating last year. Then cold weather forced crawfish to go dormant, temporarily pausing the species’ feeding and molting process simultaneously, Shirley adds.

The LSU AgCenter estimated the state crawfish industry could lose $140 million this season.

That estimate expands when accounting for out of state economies, like Texas’ crawfish market.

Hebert adds, “It'll take four or five years before we get back where we're supposed to be.” 

Peak season hits a crater 

In its first several years, Powell, who purchases most of the establishment’s crawfish from Louisiana, said the restaurant typically sold 1,200 pounds of crawfish a week between February and April, and, again, from early summer to the Fourth of July. The boom times for restaurants like Powell’s and others align with the heights of the crawfish industry’s harvest schedule.

But this year, the crawfish industry’s boom times have gone bust.   

“We're not making money, but we're not losing money at a pace that would kill us,” Hebert says of his family operation’s financial standing lately. “Can we sustain this for a year—for two years? No, probably not. We'll have to find something else to do. We'll have to go get jobs.” 

Luckily for Dane’s Crawfish and More, the menu is diverse enough to omit crawfish temporarily. 

Powell says he hopes to make up lost profit this summer, or during next year’s crawfish season.

Still, “a year’s time, that’s a long way away,” Powell says.

He paused and continued, “You never know what’s going to happen.”