Author: Chita Craft
Published: 9:14 AM CDT April 24, 2025
Updated: 9:22 AM CDT April 24, 2025
HOUSTON — We're in the peak of crawfish season, so we went behind the scenes in Louisiana with the experts to learn more about the mudbugs' journey from their pond to your plate.
Before they’re served up at a restaurant or at your broil, crawfish spend months growing in rice fields.
“Then we harvest the rice sometime in July or August, so we have to drain our fields, get all the water, let it dry up,” said Earl Toups with Toups Crawfish, LLC. “And then in October, normally in October, we'll start flooding up once the temperatures cool off, so the oxygen stays good in the fields because if you do it when it's hot, there'll be too much deterioration of the rice stubble, and it'll take the oxygen out of the water.”
By February, it’s harvest time. From a 10-acre pond, you can expect about 200,000 crawfish. Toup's Crawfish LLC usually hauls in an impressive six to eight million pounds of live crawfish each year. To put that in perspective, eight million pounds of crawfish is enough to feed everyone who attended this year's Houston Rodeo. That breaks down to about 3 pounds each, which is what most people eat at a typical crawfish boil.
So how many babies can a crawfish have?
“They'll normally have somewhere between three and 700 on average,” Toups said.
What can limit the supply of crawfish is a drought. That's why in 2024 the prices were a little bit higher. The good news is that recent rain should help lower crawfish prices in 2025.
Also, Toups said crawfish can survive a freeze and even the snow.
But weather isn't the only challenge. Once the crawfish are out of the pond, it's all about speed sorting, cleaning, and shipping to get them from the bayou to your boil.
“If you were cooking this crawfish and boil it at a certain time when the crawfish get cooked, it'll open up and they got white, but it'll be really white when you boil it and when it opens up, it'll stay open for 20-30 seconds and it's gonna close back up,” Toups said. “Well, during the time it's open, that's when you should be taking your crawfish out because otherwise you're overcooking them.”
So, grab a plate and enjoy
