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Vernon Pfister has managed the LSU AgCenter’s crawfish ponds since they were created in 1983 as part of the University’s Aquaculture Research Station on Ben Hur Road. It’s basically a big, wet laboratory for testing new techniques that will, hopefully, make the crawfish farmer’s life a little easier.

“It’s a tough job because the prices keep changing,” Pfister says. When asked how the Louisiana crawfish farmer is doing this year, he won’t even put forward a guess. Say they were having a great season; mention that in a publication like Business Report, and the price could drop across the state.

“If we can do research to harvest more efficiently, that directly benefits the farmer,” Pfister says. Harvesting is generally the crawfish farmer’s biggest expense, accounting for two-thirds or so of the total cost.

During the summer, the six ponds covering about 25 acres are drained so a crop of rice can be planted, and the crawfish dig into their summer homes. In mid-September, the ponds are flooded again and the mudbugs emerge from their burrows to eat rice and lay their eggs. Starting Nov. 1, Pfister goes crawfishing once a week, which he increases to three times a week as the water warms. Aerators in the pond churn the water, providing more oxygen to the crawfish and encouraging them to be active.

On a late February morning, Pfister and Jay Stander, the research farm’s general manager, were testing three types of metal traps. Some have three-quarter square-inch mesh, some are seven-eighths and square and some have a three-quarter hexagonal mesh like chicken wire. By the end of the season, he might discover that certain traps work best in cold water while others perform better in warm water.

“Until you go through the whole season, you don’t know how it’s going to shake out,” Phister says.

They have 600 traps to deal with. As they motor along each row in a 14-foot flat-bottom boat, Phister, standing in front wearing rubber gloves and waders nearly up to his armpits, pulls up a trap, dumps out 20 or so crawfish, baits the trap with a hunk of frozen fish and drops it back in the water. Stander, sitting at the back of the boat, pulls up the same trap and baits it with a brown pellet made of fish meal [basically ground-up fish], fish oil, grain products and corn. Then they move on to the next trap. The crawfish are eventually sold to a wholesaler to help defray the cost of the research.

The fish, mostly buffalo, with some choupic and freshwater drum as well, work well in cold water. As the water warms, they start incorporating the manufactured bait. Once the water temperature reaches the 70s, they can go strictly with the pellets.

The work has to be done in the cold, in the rain, whatever. Pfister often has a few students who work for him part-time, and says the kids who grew up around farms or outdoor labor in general tend to make the best workers.

“This is hard, hard work,” he says. “It’s hard to get help.”

But it’s much appreciated by the state’s roughly 1,300 crawfish farmers, who work about 168,000 acres of ponds, according to the most recent AgCenter estimates. LSU Professor Robert Romaire is Pfister’s boss, and has known him since Pfister was his grad student; Pfister finished his master’s degree in aquaculture in 1982. Romaire says crawfish farming is still a healthy industry, but one with extremely tight margins, and rising energy prices don’t help.

The Louisiana Crawfish Farmers Association recently accused seafood wholesalers of price fixing, as the price they were getting dropped from more than $2 a pound to $1 in just a month, according to published reports. Many farmers say $1 a pound is just about their break-even point. In early March, the association asked its members not to fish for two days a week in an effort to reduce the supply.