Crawfish farmers already are seeing the effects of the drought and heat. In monetary terms, the LSU AgCenter estimates the damage to Louisiana's crawfish industry at nearly $140 million dollars.
On his farm in Jennings, Zach Hebert is taking stock of what's just beneath the surface in a flooded field - a new crop of crawfish.
"We're starting to really see some promise. And you know that there's a crop out there, maybe a significant one, you know, which would be really good," Hebert says.
"A lot of people are saying they're seeing more crawfish emerge now. They're emerging later than normal, which is what I'm going to relate to a later than normal start of the season," adds Todd Fontenot, Crawfish Extension Agent for the LSU AgCenter.
Fontenot focuses on crawfish production for the AgCenter. He says this year's heat and drought have the industry in uncharted waters.
"There's just a lot of unknowns this year with those extreme temperatures," Fontenot says. "We had exactly what that may have done for reproduction, first of all, and their survival.
Hebert says he's worried about the losses.
"Our biggest concern was that with that heat and dryness, you know, we were going to start losing crawfish in the ground," he says.
Even after the heat eased, the drought continued to have an impact, Fontenot added.
"They were drained for harvest and drained awfully fast, faster than normal because of no rainfall. Went through the harvest with no rainfall and continued into the fall without any rainfall," Fontenot said.
Based on what he's pulling form the water, Hebert is breathing a little easier. That's because farmers like Hebert put a lot of money into this crop to put crawfish on our tables.
"It's already been extremely expensive this year. And it gets really expensive really fast," Hebert says. "Bait costs, labor costs, everything goes up every year."
However, further south, thousands of acres of crawfish ponds remain dry because of high salinity levels in surface water.
"Any waterways that were associated with the Intercoastal Canal had increased salinity and we are finding levels higher than a lot of people have ever talked about," Fontenot says.
"Those fields are normally full of water just like this. Really. The crawfish in January are bone dry. I mean there's no water and they're not going to pump, they're not going to take the deep water. They have nothing to do. So I just don't see how we're not going to see a significant drop in volume industry-wide," Hebert adds.
The LSU AgCenter estimates the drought affected about 45,000 acres of crawfish ponds and that farmers will be prevented from fishing another 43,000 acres because of saltwater intrusion or lack of water.
