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The First Crayfish Farm
Memoir
It was the smell of seafood and my grandmother's
cooking I liked the most about Friday evening, as if
the preparation for that event meant setting aside
the stress of running the family farm that week. It
seemed that everyone in the family couldn't wait
for supper time.
I could feel my senses reaching out to embrace the
particular smell of her seafood gumbo. It was like
music to the soul. The sweet nutty aroma of the
the flour roux permeated our entire house; any
excess which vented out through the open windows
invited anyone who was lucky enough to walk near
our home.
This was especially true the moment my grandma
added the onions, celery and peppers to the hot
gumbo mixture. The aroma of the sautee was
indescribable...like an invisible magnet, it would
draw you to the source – to the very pot in which
the magic elixir was brewed.
It was the closest thing to heaven that I knew.
We lived in a predominantly Catholic community
except for a small Methodist Church located off a
dirt road about three miles south of where I lived.
(Highway black topping had not reached our remote
area yet.) Eating seafood on Friday kept the family
in tune with the church's meat abstinent laws.
There was something holy about that church doctrine.
All that seafood! It was, in my thinking, God's way of
rewarding us for not eating meat. One couldn't wish
for more.
One of my most memorable moments for me came at
age seven, when my Grandfather announced to the
family that we were going to establish a crayfish
farm.
No one ever heard of such a thing. No one had a
crayfish farm in the area, and arguably, in the
entire State of Louisiana, as far as it goes.
There were no crayfish farms in which to pattern
ours after. My grandfather started from scratch.
We had always been inundated with these ubiquitous
claw pinching shell fish. They grew everywhere! Even
in people's yards.
Every June my grandfather would begin the process
of slowly releasing the water from the irrigated fields
in preparation for the July rice harvest. The ground had to
be dry and solid for a few weeks, which allowed the large
weighty harvesters to operate at maximum efficiency.
Every year, during this process, my grandpa would
harvest hundreds of pounds of these delicious fresh
water crustaceans – what seemed like millions of
small lobsters through the eyes of young boy.
My grandfather was a functional illiterate. He had not
had the opportunity to even finish grade school because
his father needed him to work on the farm instead of
attending to his education.
This didn't, in any way, mean that grandpa was stupid,
nor did it diminish his ability to conduct business. He
could calculate numbers and solve problems in his head
faster than a lot of folks who use a calculator today.
The announcement to start a crayfish farm came one
Friday afternoon when my grandfather returned from
the rice fields in his dark green 1953 Chevrolet pick up truck
loaded with two dozen sacks of crayfish. Each sack weighed
around fifty pounds. He and his farm hands had harvested
them from the run-off of one forty acre rice field.
As it turned out, his desire to run and operate a crayfish
farm, in hind sight, could not have come at a more convenient,
although inadvertent, time because Hurricane Audrey, a category
four storm, wiped out all the crops in our area, as well as rice
crops in several adjacent parishes, before they could be harvested.
If grandfather's crayfish farm plan worked, it meant that we
could defray some of the loses from the rice crop created by the
storm. It worked! Oh how did it work. It worked beyond our wildest
dreams.
Grandpa didn't have to pump underground water to flood a
forty acre farm three feet deep. There was a substantial costs
involved in doing this. The flood waters of Hurricane Audrey
solved that problem. He merely reinforced the levee system in
his field and captured, from nature, the prime ingredient to raise
crayfish – and that was water.
The storm hit land on the Texas/Louisiana coast on June 27,
1957. It was estimated that over 500 people perished. We were
fortunate enough to be located on the eastern outer periphery
of the storm. Most of the sustained damage in our area came from
the flood waters.
My grandfather managed to turn a terrible situation into an asset.
Water costs in those days, as it is now, was substantial; it would
consume nearly 20 percent of the profits. As it turned out, in this
particular circumstance, the flood was a blessing from heaven which
further enhanced the prospect of establishing and operating a successful
crayfish farm.
The entire rice crop was flattened by the storm and impossible to
harvest, so grandpa just left it as it was and flooded over it. Every-
thing was now under water. Unaware to him at the time was the
fact that the rice and the rice stalks not only gave the newly hatched
crayfish a safe haven from fish, frogs, snakes and other predators,
it also produced food for them.
In the years following the first crayfish harvesting season, we learned
that by dotting the forty acre pond with broken bales of rice straw,
it had the same effect of protecting and producing feed for future
crayfish seedlings.
Our crayfish farm had a levee system which meandered and criss-
crossed each other throughout the pond. There were nearly 4 miles of
walking space for our customers to fish from.
When I turned eight, grandpa began teaching me all about the correct
ways to cultivate the little creatures. The growing season synchronized
perfectly with the growing of rice crops. Neither growing season inter-
fered with the other; in fact, they complimented each other.
Crayfish reproduce in the spring and grow through the summer and fall
toward maturity; some are ready for harvest by November. This gave us
at least four good months to operate and produce the crawdads before
preparing the soil for the next year's rice crop.
We allowed the public to enter our ponds and do their own fishing. It
was fun and economical for them – as well as time saving and profitable
for us.
We rented bamboo cane poles, small plastic boats in which to put their
catch; we rented nets, sold bait and soft drinks. No one was allowed to
bring in equipment, food or refreshments. By doing this we were able
to hold down the natural tendency for people to pollute the pond's water.
Broken glass and trash was not a problem on our farm as it was on some
of the other farms which cropped and tried to emulate our operations
during the ensuing years.
I earned a lot of cash during my growing up years at grandpa's crayfish
farm. I fished early in the mornings and in the late afternoons after
school. I fished when it was raining...when the wind blew fiercely; I
fished through ice. And, I fished on some days which were so perfect...
with the sun was beating down just the right amount of heat to make it
so comfortable on a nearly cold day.
My first new car was purchased with the money I earned from crayfishing.
I just turned fifteen - right after I got my driver's license.
I remember the year when we stopped public fishing for insurance reasons.From then on we harvested all of the crayfish in-house. We began to use wire cages (made from chickens wire) along with cut fish as bait. We were able to quadruple our yield, as well as our profits.
It was truly a family business. Anyone in the family who needed a little
extra spending money was able to enter the pond, catch as much as he
or she wanted, and sell it. The starting price back then was twenty cents per pound.
There are times when I would like to go back – even for just a short while -to re-experience the root based feelings of fishing for crayfish on the first crayfish farm.
In memory of my grandfather: Henri Gaspard 1899 -1975.
Developer of the first commercial crayfish farm.
To read more...go to www.realcajuncooking.blogspot.com
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