re: What actually affects crawfish prices?

quote:

---

What actually affects crawfish prices?

---

Silver Slipper Casino

Mostly supply and weather. Right now supply is very low as the hot weather makes them drain the ponds because the crawfish get dark and hard as they want to bury. That cuts supply tremendously so that leaves the basin and spillway crawfish. Now it is a fairly odd year that the river has dropped very low early in summer so it takes away the backwater that you catch crawfish in. So lower supply and the price is going back up a bit and people are pulling traps out basin so we are about done for the year. Early in year its still cold so you can't catch much so again price is high.

Strategic oil reserve levels

This post. Thanks for fricking us.

The same thing that delays LSU baseball games, the sun being out to much.

Weather delays

Volume.

Gruntled kittens using Waze to try to meditate their way out of being murdered by hammerhead sharks?

Way oversimplified but here you go.


Crawfish are highly perishable so the wholesalers that buy them from the farmers set the price as high as possible and still sell everything they are buying because a dead crawfish is worth zero. I’ve seen thousands of sacks dead because price was too high for market that week. It’s a handful of the biggest wholesalers that agree on a price and it’s usually for the week but occasionally there will me a midweek change. Those wholesalers sell to the restaurants and seafood markets that mark up according to their market and desired margin. If during the season the farmer decides the price is too low for him to make money, he’ll drain his pond and plant something else. This year there were an abundance of crawfish caught so the prices were lower than the past few years. You may not have seen it at the restaurant or market because it’s been touched by farmer, wholesaler, distributor, and restaurant at that point.

Eta: and every single one bitches and complains and will tell you they’re not making money