How A Louisiana Crawfish Company Harvests 60,000 pounds A Day | Big Business | Insider Business

This

company

transports 60,000

pounds

of crabs per day once they are out of the water the clock starts ticking. Farmers have just a few hours to weigh them, sell them and put them in refrigerators, and these little guys have to be kept alive all the time as quickly as possible. When they are dead, they begin to decompose extremely quickly, become soft and spoil. These crustaceans are big

business

for Louisiana. They contribute $300 million to the state's economy and end up throughout the United States. Do you ever take a bite out of them but can you? help yourself, especially when it's hot, but this industry didn't even take off until the last few decades, in the 80s, some rice farmers took a huge gamble: they experimented with growing crabs that lived under their fields and it paid off in just nine years, Madison.

McIntyre has built one of the largest

crawfish

companies in the state, handling up to 4 million

pounds

a year. I never imagined it would get to this level nor was it our goal, it just happened organically, but because the farmed

crawfish

industry is so young, it's like the wild west, unregulated and fast moving, so how Exactly did Louisiana rice farmers come to harvest crayfish and why do they stay in such a difficult

business

? Crayfish are freshwater crustaceans related to lobsters and shrimp and they are native to the swampy river swamps of Louisiana and rice fields like this one and if you look closely you will see some holes there is one right here they have all kinds of names crayfish Mud bugs come out of the mud literally from the end of September to October rice Farmers flood their fields and the crabs came out of their burrows hungry in November and you can start trapping them in rows of traps.

Mauricio Guillén, nicknamed Junior, goes out on the Crawfish boat, which has no steering wheel and everything is controlled by pedals at his feet, armed with thick gloves. Empty each trap, you have only seven seconds to dump a load of trap with more bait and drop it back into the water and that's how much ground you cover between each trap, you must move quickly so the crabs don't die in the Louisiana Heat Junior is pretty fast, he's a lot faster than me. This table helps them remove any unwanted bugs and separates the crabs by size. Smaller peelers can fall through here.

You know they're going to go from down here and then to these sinkholes, but the crabs. The big break didn't even come until the 1980s. Rice farmers' profits were falling, so, looking for another source of income, they took a big risk and grew crabs along with the grain. Fourth generation rice farmer Jim Johnson was one of them, it just works almost perfectly together, there is almost no better combination of vegetation to ac

company

crayfish the rice plant provides a wetland for crayfish farming and shade from the sun and harbors microorganisms such as algae larvae and worms the crayfish feed on them the crab poop then fertilizes the field and the two growing seasons align perfectly when farmers harvest the rice.

The crabs have been safely roasted deep in the mud once the rice is collected. Crabs emerge from their burrows with young for the winter, ready to be harvested and eaten soon. Buyers from all over the south. From Texas to South Carolina they began devouring Mud Bugs, what was once just a local food, now represents more than half of Jim's business and with nuts and margins in the rice industry over the years, the Crawfish not only complemented it but, as you know, today's agriculture is the Crops are an important part of economies like that of Welsh Louisiana.

All crayfish nationwide are farmed within a 35-square-mile radius of this area from November to July. Rice. Farmers end up with tons of crabs stuffed into bags like these. Junior and his team load them onto trucks and book them at the Crawfish dock in the summer months, they have to weigh the mud bugs and put them in the refrigerator within three hours or else the attention could kill them and the crabs. Madison pays rice farmers about $25 a pound for their catch, unlike most rice sellers. crabs, he doesn't come from a farming family in 2014, he and his friend Charlie started selling them out of their truck in New Orleans at an abandoned gas station and we were going to eat brain crab there on the weekend.

It was so successful that it bought more trucks and expanded into a wholesale seafood company Enterprise Parish, while many crab companies focus on only one part of the process Madison does it all along with her dog June, growing her own crab and He buys it from 36 other farmers. He also owns a company that transports the catch, a processing plant and restaurants that eliminate the middleman. Now we have a little more. 60 employees run 14 trucks seven days a week 24 7. Madison washes some of her catches in this hundred and fifty thousand dollar machine every day, every day, yeah, but you get used to it like it doesn't really hurt, not only do they have to wash their fingers they have to be careful with the escapees, they are escape artists, so yes, the crabs have to go to the coolers immediately after washing to keep them alive until they are sold.

Madison tries to move the largest, high-quality crabs within 12 to 24 hours. but that's not always easy, that's it, practically everything is done with a handshake, there are no contracts, you have to be careful because people can buy all your crabs at the beginning of the season and then as soon as the catch increases, it could be them. He can leave you and buy it from someone else. Leaving crabs stranded in these coolers, there can be a lot of pressure. The smaller, lower-quality crabs are easier for him to move because Madison simply sells them to himself and then sends them to his brother's Bridge Factory for processing. tail meat workers begin unloading crabs from trucks starting at 4 a.m. m., they dump them into tanks and remove the dead or weak ones from the top, then they wash the mud bugs, a conveyor belt drops them into a giant steam basket using a track system a worker carefully lowers the basket into a tub of boiling water Just like lobsters, crabs go in alive for the best flavor, which is why it's so important to keep them kicking until this point, it only takes two minutes to cook them completely.

Madison and the team knock them down this steel table and into the peeling room. Leona Williams has been fighting here for 50 years one in the morning. Well, you cut off the head and then pinch the tail. This is for me, feel good to make sure the veins are out, sure she can peel about 40 pounds a day and you have to be a little quick on that. That's the only way you can make money. They pay them 250 per pound. Are you the fastest here? Oh no, I'm not. I'm going to save this. I have my sister here.

She's a little faster than me. The team in the next room vacuum seals the Tails into one-pound bags because the competition is so tough. Madison didn't tell us where she sells them, but she said they end up. Across the U.S., he also ships tail meat and whole crabs to three restaurants he owns in the state, where they prepare all kinds of Louisiana delicacies, a part of south Louisiana culture for centuries, according to the native heritage project that the Houma Indians named themselves after the word. for the crayfish and she used it as a symbol of war in the 19th century.

A wave of French Canadians settled in Louisiana after being expelled from Canada by the British. They became known as the Cajuns and brought their lobster recipes with them, but they were lacking lobster here. They were switched to crayfish in the 1960s. Crawfish had their own festival and Creole restaurants were adding them to menus in New Orleans. It was definitely a Louisiana delicacy. In reality, it didn't get much further than the state. Since then, crabs have definitely gone national, but locals still cook. he puts them in staples like etouffee wedding and Boyles Madison business partner Charlie Johnson uses a Cajun style of cooking on his crab boils, make sure the drains are closed, this is a liquid boil, so I add it to the water.

First you boil the corn and potatoes, drain them and then cook the crabs at the end right there, when the tail starts to separate from the head, there is that little white line, you can see the meat, which is usually a telltale sign that they are ready, while New Orleans steak chefs add dry seasonings. water crabs boil out here. Cajuns add the dry seasoning after they are cooked. Thanks, we close that cooler and let them steam. I think the magic happens in the cooler, that's when they start absorbing those condiments down here. People stop by the restaurant late into the night, Cajuns love their sauce too.

At Nova, they don't use sauce, yes, with their Factory weigh station and restaurants Madison has become a major player in the crab industry, we are building a new facility that will focus on air transport of crawfish, but Its success came without challenge as the industry flourished over the past 20 years, many people tried to get in on the action by 2019, the number of crawfish farms in the state had doubled and then came inflation Madison says costs skyrocketed 40 percent last year fuel alone cost a hundred and fifty thousand dollars more than normal, that's a lot of money that would have been a profit, yes the labor is quite high and we have mainly foreign labor. 95 of its staff are working. in the US with a Visa, I think we also have to house them and pay for transportation, you can't find local or American labor that works as hard as these guys do alongside us.

Madison says he pays them just under 14 years. hour almost double the minimum wage we will work 15 and 18 hour days seven days a week, so it is very demanding, we don't get to see our family as much during the season, but they don't get to see their family at all. Rising operating costs and low margins have forced dozens of Louisiana Crawfish companies to close, so people who came just for the get-rich-quick scheme or who didn't make it right now because of how tough the market, Madison says the size of his company. It's helped keep it afloat, you know we were able to absorb those hits, but a lot of people unfortunately couldn't handle one of the changes you made to get through this.

We don't get big salaries. Madison said Parish Seafood Wholesale saw five hundred. thousand dollars in profits last year and paid himself only a salary of twenty thousand dollars. He also says that he invested more than 80 percent of the profits into the company, so if something breaks or if the refrigerators break down, we have backup, all you know, backup trucks. backup ice machines backup freezers backup refrigerators we have multiple forklifts that are just luxuries because in an industry where a bad season could be the company that packs I think you know in the next five or six years it will be very lucrative to be back in this industry because only a handful of people will do it, where is that?