Crawfish farmers are making a killing off disaster relief program.

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Inventory and Production Records Flexibilities

ELAP policy requires producers to provide a beginning and ending inventory record. But, due to the unique crawfish production systems, this is an almost impossible ask of producers. To meet the needs of crawfish producers, FSA is implementing ELAP inventory and production records flexibilities that offer options for producers who have records and for those who don’t; allowing all commercial crawfish producers an opportunity to apply for ELAP assistance.

Under current ELAP policy, for program payments to be calculated for farm-raised fish losses, commercial crawfish producers must provide FSA with historical production data for 2021 to 2023. For producers who cannot provide the required production records, FSA will assign production values based on county expected yields from an Olympic average of the previous five years in that parish. Crawfish production is maintained in pounds/surface acre by each producer. LSU maintains the information with parish and state averages. These averages were used in 2021 to establish a county expected yield for each parish.

Calculating Payments

Depending on the availability of producer records, ELAP payments will be calculated by taking the established beginning inventory three-year average production history (or the county expected yield) per surface acre of water, certified on the FSA-578 Report of Acreage form, minus the current year's production records.

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