Louisiana produces 90% of the United States' crawfish. Most of the farmed crawfish comes from rice fields in one small area of Cajun country. There, the industry is fairly new. In the 1980s, rice farmers experimented with cultivating crawfish in their fields. And it paid off. Today, business is booming, clearing the way for the next generation of farmers like Madison McIntyre. But the industry is also unregulated and fast-moving, trapping producers in an endless fight to keep crawfish alive.
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00:00 (upbeat music)
00:02 This company hauls in 60,000 pounds of crawfish a day.
00:06 Once they're out of the water, the clock starts ticking.
00:09 Farmers have just a few hours to get them weighed,
00:13 sold, and into coolers, and these little guys
00:15 have to stay alive the whole time.
00:17 - As soon as they're dead, it starts breaking them down
00:20 extremely fast.
00:21 Yeah, they'll get mushy and spoiled.
00:23 - These crustaceans are big business for Louisiana.
00:27 They contribute $300 million to the state's economy
00:30 and end up across the US.
00:32 - Do you ever sneak a bite?
00:34 - But you can't help yourself, especially when they're hot.
00:37 - But this industry didn't even take off
00:39 until recent decades.
00:41 In the '80s, some rice farmers took a massive gamble.
00:44 They experimented with cultivating the crawfish
00:46 that lived below their fields, and it paid off.
00:49 In just nine years, Madison McIntyre has built
00:52 one of the biggest crawfish companies in the state,
00:55 handling up to four million pounds a year.
00:57 - Never imagined that it would be to this level,
01:01 nor was it our goal.
01:02 It kind of just happened organically.
01:04 - But because the farmed crawfish industry is so young,
01:08 it's like the Wild West, unregulated and fast-moving.
01:11 So how exactly did Louisiana's rice farmers
01:14 come to harvest crawfish?
01:16 And why do they stay in such a tough business?
01:22 Crawfish are freshwater crustaceans
01:25 related to lobsters and shrimp.
01:27 And they're native to Louisiana's bayous,
01:30 rivers, swamps, and rice fields, like this one.
01:32 - And if you look closely, you'll see some holes.
01:36 There's one right here.
01:38 - They go by all sorts of names, crawdads,
01:41 crayfish, mud bugs.
01:42 - They come out the mud, literally.
01:45 - From late September to October,
01:48 rice farmers flood their fields,
01:50 and the crawfish emerge from their burrows hungry.
01:53 By November, he can start catching them in rows of traps.
01:56 Mauricio Guillen, nicknamed Junior,
02:01 heads out on the crawfish boat,
02:03 which doesn't have a steering wheel.
02:05 - And all that's controlled by foot pedals
02:07 that are at his feet.
02:08 - Armed with thick gloves, he empties each trap.
02:11 He has just seven seconds to dump out a trap,
02:16 load in more bait, and drop it back in the water.
02:19 - And that's just how much ground it covers
02:21 between each trap.
02:23 - He's gotta move quickly,
02:24 so the crawfish don't die in the Louisiana heat.
02:27 - Junior's pretty fast.
02:29 He's a lot faster than me.
02:30 - This table helps them weed out any unwanted critters.
02:34 And it separates the crawfish by size.
02:38 - The smaller peelers can fall through here.
02:40 You know, they'll go from underneath here
02:41 and then into these sags.
02:43 - But crawfish's big break didn't even come
02:45 until the 1980s.
02:47 Rice farmers' profits were dipping.
02:49 So looking for another income stream,
02:51 they took a big risk
02:52 and cultivated crawfish alongside the grain.
02:55 Fourth-generation rice farmer Jim Johnson
02:58 was one of them.
02:59 - It just works almost perfect together.
03:02 There's almost no better combination of vegetation
03:08 to go with crawfish.
03:10 - The rice plant provides a wetland for crawfish breeding
03:13 and shade from the sun,
03:14 and plays host to microorganisms
03:16 like algae, larva, and worms.
03:19 - The crawfish will feed off of those.
03:22 - The crawfish's poop then fertilizes the fields,
03:26 and the two crop seasons line up perfectly.
03:29 When farmers harvest the rice,
03:30 the crawfish have safely burrowed themselves
03:32 deep into the mud.
03:33 Once the rice is picked,
03:34 crawfish emerge from their burrows with babies.
03:37 By winter, they're ready to be harvested and eaten.
03:40 Soon, buyers all over the South,
03:44 from Texas to South Carolina,
03:46 begin gobbling up the mud bugs.
03:48 What was once just a local eat
03:50 now makes up more than half of Jim's business.
03:54 - And with declining margins in the rice industry
03:57 through the years,
03:59 the crawfish has not only supplemented it,
04:01 but helped agriculture thrive.
04:04 - Today, the crops are an important part of economies
04:07 like Welsh Louisiana's.
04:10 - All the crawfish in the whole nation
04:12 are farmed in a 35-mile square radius of this area.
04:15 - From November to July,
04:18 rice farmers end up with tons of crawfish,
04:21 packed into sacks like these.
04:22 Junior and his team will load them onto trucks
04:25 and book it to the crawfish dock.
04:27 In the summer months,
04:29 they have to get the mud bugs weighed
04:30 and in the cooler within three hours,
04:32 or else the heat could kill them.
04:35 And dead crawfish breed bacteria.
04:37 Once cooked, it's technically still edible,
04:39 but the meat falls apart and it doesn't taste as good.
04:42 Madison pays rice farmers about $1.25 a pound
04:45 for their catch.
04:47 Unlike most crawfish mongers,
04:49 he doesn't come from a farming family.
04:51 In 2014, he and his friend Charlie
04:53 started selling them out of his truck in New Orleans.
04:56 - At an abandoned gas station,
04:57 and we would do our bowl of crawfish
05:00 through there on the weekend.
05:02 - It was so successful,
05:03 he bought more trucks
05:04 and expanded into a full-fledged enterprise,
05:07 Parrish Seafood Wholesale.
05:09 While a lot of crawfish companies
05:11 focus on just one part of the process,
05:13 Madison does it all.
05:14 Along with his dog, June.
05:16 He grows his own crawfish
05:19 and buys from 36 other rice farmers.
05:22 He also owns a company that hauls the catch,
05:24 a processing plant, and restaurants,
05:27 cutting out the middlemen.
05:28 - Now we have a little over 60 employees.
05:32 We run 14 trucks,
05:35 seven days a week, 24/7.
05:38 - Madison washes some of his catch
05:40 on this $150,000 machine.
05:44 (upbeat music)
05:45 - How many times have you gotten
05:46 poked by crawfish?
05:47 - Every day.
05:49 Every day, yeah, but you get used to it.
05:50 Like, it doesn't really hurt.
05:52 - Not only do they have to watch their fingers,
05:54 they have to watch out for runaways.
05:56 - They're escape artists, so yeah.
05:58 - Crawfish have to hit the coolers
06:02 right after washing
06:03 to keep them alive until they're sold.
06:06 Madison tries to move the high-grade,
06:07 larger crawfish within 12 to 24 hours,
06:10 but that's not always easy.
06:12 - It's all pretty much done on a handshake.
06:14 There's no contracts.
06:16 You have to be careful,
06:16 'cause people can buy all of your crawfish
06:18 in the beginning of the season,
06:19 and then as soon as the catch picks up,
06:21 they can leave you and buy from somebody else.
06:25 - Stranding crawfish in these fridges.
06:28 - It can be a lot of pressure.
06:30 - The low-grade, smaller crawfish
06:33 are easier for him to move,
06:35 because Madison just sells it to himself.
06:37 Then he sends it to his Bro Bridge factory
06:39 to process the tail meat.
06:42 Workers start unloading the crawfish off the trucks,
06:44 starting at 4 a.m.
06:45 They dump them into tanks
06:48 and skim off any dead or weak ones from the top.
06:50 Then they give the mud bugs a wash.
06:54 A conveyor belt drops them into a giant steamer basket.
06:57 Using a system of tracks,
07:00 a worker carefully lowers the basket
07:02 into a vat of boiling water.
07:04 Just like lobsters,
07:05 crawfish go in alive to get the best flavor.
07:09 That's why it's so important to keep them kicking
07:11 until this moment.
07:13 It takes just two minutes to cook them through.
07:16 Then Madison and the team
07:17 rake them down this steel table into the peeling room.
07:20 Leona Williams has been peeling here for 50 years.
07:29 - Learned this from mama at the age of 13.
07:33 Get off of school, help out mom.
07:35 Sometimes until one in the morning.
07:38 Girl, you break the head off,
07:40 and then you pinch the tail.
07:42 This is the meat.
07:43 Peel them well to make sure that the veins are out for sure.
07:48 - She can peel about 40 pounds worth a day.
07:51 - And you gotta be kind of fast at it.
07:53 That's about the only way you could make money.
07:56 - They get paid $2.50 a pound.
08:01 Are you the fastest one here?
08:03 - Uh, no, I'm not gonna say this.
08:05 I have my sister right here.
08:07 She's a little faster than I am.
08:08 - The team in the next room
08:12 vacuum seals the tails into one-pound bags.
08:15 Because competition is so stiff,
08:17 Madison wouldn't tell us where he sells these,
08:19 but he said they end up across the US.
08:21 He also sends tail meat and whole crawfish
08:25 to three restaurants he owns in the state,
08:27 cooking up all kinds of Louisiana delicacies.
08:29 Crawfish have been an important part
08:32 of Southern Louisiana's culture for centuries.
08:35 According to the Native Heritage Project,
08:37 the Homa indigenous people named themselves
08:39 after the word for crawfish and used it as a war symbol.
08:43 In the 1800s, a wave of French Canadians
08:45 settled in Louisiana after being forced
08:47 out of Canada by the British.
08:49 They came to be known as the Cajuns,
08:52 and they brought their lobster recipes with them.
08:54 But short on lobster here, they swapped in crawfish.
08:58 By the 1960s, crawfish had their own festival,
09:01 and Creole restaurants were adding them
09:02 to menus in New Orleans.
09:05 It was definitely a Louisiana delicacy.
09:08 It didn't really get much farther than the state.
09:11 Crawfish have since gone definitively national,
09:14 but locals still cook them into staples,
09:15 like étouffée, beaudin, and boils.
09:18 Madison's business partner, Charlie Johnson,
09:21 uses a Cajun cooking style in his crawfish boils.
09:24 Make sure the drain's shut.
09:27 This is liquid boil.
09:29 So I'm adding that to the water.
09:34 He first boils the corn and potatoes,
09:36 drains them, and then cooks the crawfish last.
09:42 Right there, when the tail starts to kind of separate
09:48 from the head, there's that little white line.
09:50 You can see the meat.
09:51 That's usually a telltale sign that they're ready.
09:54 While New Orleans Creole chefs add dry seasoning
09:58 to the water crawfish boil in,
10:00 out here, Cajuns dump on the dry seasoning
10:03 after they're cooked.
10:04 We shut that ice chest, and we let them steam.
10:10 I think the magic happens in the ice chest.
10:13 That's when they start to soak up those seasonings.
10:15 Down here, folks stop by the restaurant
10:18 well into the evening.
10:20 The Cajuns also love their dip.
10:27 While back in Nova, they don't use any sauce.
10:30 - Probably the most out of all of us.
10:32 - Yeah.
10:32 With his factory, weigh station, and restaurants,
10:38 Madison has become a considerable player
10:40 in the crawfish industry.
10:41 - We're building a new facility
10:44 that's gonna be focused on air freight crawfish.
10:47 - But his success hasn't come without its challenges.
10:50 As the industry boomed over the last 20 years,
10:54 lots of people tried to get in on the action.
10:56 By 2019, the number of crawfish farms
10:59 in the state had doubled.
11:01 And then came inflation.
11:02 Madison says costs soared 40%.
11:06 Last year, fuel alone cost him $150,000 more than normal.
11:10 - That's a lot of money.
11:13 That would have been profit.
11:15 Yeah, labor's pretty high, and we have mostly foreign labor.
11:18 - 95% of his staff is working in the U.S. on a visa.
11:22 - And then we also have to house them
11:24 and pay for transportation.
11:26 You can't find local or American labor
11:28 that would work as hard as these guys do
11:30 side by side with us.
11:31 - Madison says he pays them just under $14 an hour,
11:35 almost double the minimum wage.
11:37 - We'll put in 15 and 18-hour days, seven days a week.
11:40 So it's very demanding.
11:42 We don't get to see our family as much during the season,
11:44 but they don't get to see their family at all.
11:47 - Soaring operation costs and low margins
11:49 have forced dozens of Louisiana crawfish companies to close.
11:53 - And so the people that came in
11:55 just for the Get Quick Rich scheme
11:58 are not making it right now
12:00 because of how tough the market is.
12:02 - Madison says the size of his company
12:04 has helped keep him afloat.
12:05 - You know, we could absorb those blows,
12:08 but a lot of people unfortunately couldn't.
12:10 - What big changes have you made
12:12 to make it through this?
12:14 - We don't get big salaries.
12:16 - Madison said Parrish Seafood Wholesale
12:18 saw $500,000 in profit last year,
12:21 and he paid himself just a $20,000 salary.
12:25 He also says he invested more than 80% of the profit
12:28 back into the company.
12:29 - So if anything ever breaks or if coolers go out,
12:32 we have backup everything, you know,
12:34 backup trucks, backup ice machines,
12:35 backup freezers, backup coolers.
12:38 We have multiple forklifts, which are all just luxuries.
12:42 - Because in an industry where one bad season
12:44 could send a company packing,
12:46 Madison has to fight to keep each crawfish alive.
12:49 - I think, you know, in the next five or six years,
12:52 it'll be very lucrative again to be in this industry
12:54 because there'll only be a handful of people doing it.
12:57 (upbeat music)
13:00 - Where's that?
13:08 (upbeat music)