WWL: Who sets the prices for crawfish in Louisiana? It’s a true mystery

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On a sunny morning at David Savoy’s crawfish farm near Church Point, Louisiana, the work harvesting crawfish was basically done by 9:30 a.m. Savoy took me into the cooling facility where they store the live crawfish caught from the network of ponds and fields at his 1,600-acre farm. There was more space than sacks of live crawfish.

“So, on these carts there’s only about 15 sacks. We’d normally have about 30 to 40 sacks on these carts and the carts would be all the way around cooler,” Savoy told me.

But it’s not a normal year for crawfish farmers. There were only a few carts in Savoy’s cooler. Extreme heat and drought conditions in 2023 are being blamed for the diminished supply of crawfish and the unusually high price of the crawfish making it to market. Louisiana is the top producer of crawfish in the U.S. Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry issued a disaster declaration for the industry last week. Losses for the crawfish industry this year have been estimated to be around $140 million.

Crawfish is engrained Louisiana’s culture and a shortage of it is being felt far beyond the crawfish farms in the state. Like any commodity, its impact on customers and pricing often gets the most attention.

Laney King is the co-founder of The Crawfish App. The free mobile app allows users to find crawfish and prices for live or boiled crawfish in their city/community. The Crawfish App launched in 2017. King told me the scarcity of crawfish this season has, at times, caused prices to go beyond $12 and $13 per pound. She says one business was selling crawfish at a price of more than $16/pound earlier this season. But prices have come down a bit. When I spoke with King last week, she said the average price was around $7.99/pound for boiled crawfish. That’s still high, but compared to double digit dollar amounts, the recent prices seem almost tolerable.

“They’re about as reasonable as they’re going to get. If you want some crawfish, this is what you’re going to pay. Hopefully, they’ll go down a little bit more before Easter. Easter is kind of like the Super Bowl Sunday of crawfish season that’s typically when they’re a good size, they’re a great price. It’s the biggest sales day of the entire season for everyone involved but you’re going have to shell out some money this Easter if you want to feed your family with crawfish,” said King.

Ultimately, the price dominates every aspect of the crawfish industry. From the production to consumption of it, how much people are willing to sell or buy crawfish is at the center of every transaction. But who sets these prices that often fluctuate weekly? David Savoy said if you think it’s the crawfish farmers who are setting the price, you’d be mistaken.

“I’ve asked every politician and every marketing person, if the price of gas in the entire state of Louisiana changed tomorrow morning by the same amount, would you find that strange? Would you find that legal? How can it happen in this tiny industry? They dropped the price at the beginning of the week everywhere. I didn’t do that. There’s not a farmer around that did that,” Savoy told me.

Who sets crawfish prices, and how that goes down, seems to be a true mystery…even to those in the industry. It’s one of the many aspects of the crawfish business I learned about when I visited Savoy’s crawfish farm.

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