00:00:04 Speaker 1: Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife, wild places and the people who dedicate their lives to conserving both. Big shout out to onex Hunt for their support of this podcast. I'm your host, Lake Pickle. Last week we dug into the topic of crayfish, crawfish and crawdads. I purposely inserted the crawdad terminology in there because some of y'all let me know loud and clear last time that I left that name out the first time around. Anyway, we found out a good bit. But like I said, and like we saw, there's a whole lot more to learn about these tiny critters. Heck, we didn't even talk about the crawfish that end up in a crawfish bowl. But fret not, my friends, because that's what this week's episode is all about. So get ready because we're in for another round of stories and facts that are both interesting and unexpected. Let's get into it. 00:01:10 Speaker 2: Oh and you'll like this. 00:01:11 Speaker 3: Sorry, I'm all in. I listened to your podcast about the pogy boats, okay and all that. Yeah, you can cut this out of the whole podcast if you need too or whatever, but yeah, I'll listen to your podcast about the pogy boats, and for a while I had been driving out on Louisiana and getting pogies to bake crawfish crawfish traps with. 00:01:33 Speaker 1: Let me give you a little bit of context. I know it may sound confusing from the jump, you know, like I said, we're talking about crawfish again, but this guy's talking about pogi's. What's going on here? Well, the man that you're hearing is a friend of mine by the name of Jason Roberts, a fellow Mississippian, a heck of a wildlife artist and a crawfish farmer who owns and operates Mississippi Crawfish Company. I head up Jason about an interview to get the crawfish farming side of this story, which will dive into fully. But when he threw in this a little bit about pogi's, well it got my attention. 00:02:04 Speaker 3: And let me tell you, like, pogis work extremely well for crawfish bait. When you bait these crawfish traps early in the season, when the water temperature is cold, you're using you typically want to use fish right just because it just gives off this like especially pogies, they give off this like oily just you know, Yeah, they're more potent, so it attracts the crawfish in there when they're like less active. As the water temperature starts warming up, you use this, you switch over to either a combination or eventually switch over entirely to this pellet bait. And it's like this tube. You know, it's almost like a little thicker than a hot dog, I guess, but about that length of like this you know, artificial bait, and it's just like compacted just grain and other kind of fish and animal parts in there. 00:02:49 Speaker 1: Yeah, sounds kind of like the catfish food kind of. 00:02:51 Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like that, or like if you're familiar with like range cubes, they yeah, at'll yeah, it's like that, but bigger. But there's just like some little bit of you know, fish, fish or whatever in there, just to give it a little bit of stink. But that's a lot easier to work with because it just doesn't stink like fish when it starts to get hot and all. Anyway, getting back to it, I was going to tell you about the pogies. I've been using pogies for the past several years. Early in the season, well, I listened to your podcast. I'm like, man, these pogies is this is like becoming a controversial thing, Like do I need to like seek out another bait fish? And of course I've used you know, just old crappy you know uses like that from going crappy fishing and just save all stuff, put it in the freezer. That works really really well, even old catfish. For some reason, catfish doesn't work. Nothing works as good as pogies. But long story short, I've kind of gotten into frogging, yeah, with my kids, and I decided to take one of my girls and a buddy and his kid. We went frogging up in this lake in the Delta last year. And when we first got going, man, it was like carp i was jumping invasive carp jumping all over the place. We had one jumping the boat, and it was like a giant, like thirty pound, you know, jumps in there, hits the guys like trollo motor or something and just starts spewing blood. 00:04:07 Speaker 2: It's just a mess. 00:04:08 Speaker 3: Of course, kids are freaked out, and I'm like, sure, I like goy So that kind of we caught a few frogs, but kind of like happened early on in the night. So it just kind of set the tone for our frog in that night, you know, and everybody was like on edge, and yeah, it's like, man, somebody needs to do something about these about these carp and these invasive carp because they're just ruining the the experience here. I just want to go out and go go for fron yeah, you know. And so I thought, man, I wonder if it's a way to turn those into crawfish bait. Long story short, I started doing some research on it, and I found a place in Indianola and apparently somehow the Department of Wildlife had like I don't wan to say, pay people on how it all works to go out and catch these invasive carp and some of these Delta lakes. And this company like buys them and they you know, cut them up and back at them up, and they ship them and they ate, they sell them for food, and they even sell them for it started selling them to places in Louisiana for crawfish bait. 00:05:07 Speaker 2: This place is right up the road. 00:05:08 Speaker 3: So I'm like, man, this is just a win all around. So long story short, I've worked out I've quit using Pogi's entirely. Now I'm using this these carp I get them cut up in the little two by two inch pieces and they're perfect, just you know, pre cut dropping down the and they work every bit as good as a pogy Do you really think I would cut that out? 00:05:26 Speaker 2: And I use it. I'm absolutely keeping that. 00:05:31 Speaker 1: God is my witness. I had no idea the old pogy boat episode would work its way into another backwoods university. But here we are, and now that we had a bit of an icebreaker with meeting Jason and had a great story that involved crawfish, pogy boats, flying carp and frog gigging. In all honesty, that's gonna be a tough story to follow up. But let's get into this whole crawfish farming endeavor. When did you get into crawfish farming? 00:05:58 Speaker 3: Farming crawfish? I started doing that in twenty twenty two. That's when I actually bought some old catfish ponds in bal Zona. That's where we're doing this crawfish farming thing. 00:06:11 Speaker 1: Now you answered like, there's more to the story there, Well there is, okay, yeah, Well, I mean I think, like I told you before, well maybe I didn't, but you know, this whole thing started from just. 00:06:21 Speaker 3: Being a big duck hunter. And we just had noticed when we were draining our duck hole that there's crawfish everywhere. One spring, and I thought, man, let's get some crawfish traps and see if we can catch them and maybe just kind of throw them in our crawfish bowl along with the ones that we've purchased, sure, you know, kind of supplement. And you know, we bought some crawfish traps and started catching them out of that duck hole, I mean, started catching a lot of them. And it was at the point where it's like, man, maybe we could maybe we could sell. 00:06:50 Speaker 2: These, yeah, turn it into the business. Yeah yeah. 00:06:52 Speaker 3: And And anyway, that that property, that big duck hole was right next to the Black River that you know floods this is in you know Von missip Be. Flood's really really bad during the spring. Sometimes it'll get out and it'll stay out, you know, for a month. And so that was the problem. There after we had bought a bunch of crawfish, you know, harvesting equipment, traps and boat and that kind of thing, and and and put them out there. The river jumped out and stayed out for an entire month. One time it was like, okay, this, this can't be done. 00:07:25 Speaker 1: Yeah, you know. 00:07:26 Speaker 3: And so I had had this idea that heck, these old catfish ponds up in the Delta a perfect right. You got already a you know, totally leveed off pond. You know, you got a well there as a water source. And uh, I mean most of the time, like I said, because you got all four levees, you're not going to have to deal with you know, flooding from somewhere. You know, typically it's going to cause that problem. So but yeah, it was I'd been looking around for for some old catfish ponds for a long time, which are very hard to come by, but they're not you know, grown up in trees and then WRP or CRP and whatever. And so I was actually able to find these in Balzona and in the spring. It was April i think, whenever we closed on that property of twenty twenty two, and so that's when I guess you could say I started farming them, you know, doing it actually commercially, you know, selling them. Before then, it was all just kind of a thing like after duck season was over, we'd pull out. 00:08:22 Speaker 2: The crawfish traps. 00:08:23 Speaker 3: In February, it'd start catching crawfish all spring long. Yeah, and I say we, I mean it was it was me and my dad, you know, and it eventually kind of ended up being mostly me going out there. 00:08:34 Speaker 2: I mean, he'd come with me every now and then. 00:08:37 Speaker 3: I'd bring friends and that kind of thing, you know, every now and then, and of course they would get a taste of it and be like this is this, you can have this. 00:08:45 Speaker 1: And they didn't want to come back. 00:08:46 Speaker 3: Just let me know when you bring the crawfish back, and I'll be there for the crawfish bul Because it's just so labor intensive. 00:08:52 Speaker 1: How much would you catch, like in the spring before you had the ponds before you how much would you catch when you're just recreationally doing it? 00:08:59 Speaker 3: You know, It just all the ends on how many traps we had out gotcha, no catching anywhere from a pound to three pounds per trap. So I mean at a commercial like a rate. I mean, like if you had a crawfish farm, that's what you would expect to catch during the peak of the season. 00:09:16 Speaker 2: Really. Yeah, So that's. 00:09:17 Speaker 3: Kind of what made me think, Okay, you know, I always thought that crawfish farming is just something they do in Louisiana. 00:09:24 Speaker 2: We can't. 00:09:25 Speaker 3: We can't do it here. You know, it just can't be done here for whatever reason. I didn't know enough about it as to the reasons why it couldn't be done here. But all that to say that's not true. It can be done here, currently doing it, but it. Yeah, that that kind of made me think, Oh, you can catch this much crawfish up here, and the qualities every bit is good. I mean, you know, why aren't we doing this? 00:09:47 Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, I'd say that's a bit of an unorthodox start to a crawfish farm, but I like it. I'm also intrigued at the notion that Jason, much like all the rest of us, acknowledged that there's just a whole heck of a lot that we don't know about crawfish, such as him thinking that Louisiana was the only place that you could farm crawfish. I'm interested now in what kind of species he was catching, because, if you remember last week, the two crawfish that we talked about the most were warpaint mudbugs and Jackson prairie crayfish, none of which would you often see in a bowl. So what species are we After thinking about species of crawfish. Now, because of my conversation with Calvin, my ignorance to it. I didn't even know there were different species. I just thought there was crawfish, you know. So when you were first catching these crawfish just for the sake of we can make a bowl out of this, like, did you know what you were catching? When the first time he. 00:10:41 Speaker 2: Tried to boil it? Did it turn out? 00:10:43 Speaker 3: Well? 00:10:43 Speaker 2: Like, how did that go? Yeah? 00:10:45 Speaker 3: So we did know what we were catching. And only because LSU has this Crawfish Production Manual that you can just google and pull it up, and it's this whole just I don't know how many page thing of like if you were gonna want to farm crawfish, it's the whole guidebook of how to do it, you know, and it gives you the two main species of crawfish that you are commercially you know, farmed and caught while in the wild, you know, child flaid, basin and wherever else. 00:11:17 Speaker 1: The LSU ag Centers Louisiana Crawfish Production Manual, page one list the two species of commercial importance and Louisiana crawfish ponds as the red Swamp crawfish and the white River crawfish. 00:11:30 Speaker 3: And so once we started catching these crawfish, I immediately kind of did some research and found that Yeah, and it just I mean, I'd like dove all in to find out and learn everything about yeah, crawfish and their behavior and crawfish farm and all that. So yeah, I quickly learned what we were catching and what we wanted and what we didn't want. But then I was occasionally catching one species of crawfish that I wasn't sure what it was for a long time. 00:11:58 Speaker 2: Finally figured it out. 00:11:59 Speaker 3: What wasn't I think maybe a common name in Louisiana All times they call them a coffin cutter crawfish. 00:12:05 Speaker 1: Coffin cutter, devil crayfish, painted devil, thornytail, painted hand jewel, mudbug. I don't know. It almost sounds like the scientist in charge of naming crawfish was fond of death metal music. 00:12:16 Speaker 2: But who knows. 00:12:18 Speaker 3: Anyway, that's not your red swamp crawfish or white river crawfish that you're catching that you're or buying to go have a crawfish bowl. Okay, Yeah, but they're very colorful. They're kind of colored like a blue crab. Yeah, and uh, real pretty crawfish, and they get really big. And I started catching those every now and then, like early in the season, like they're in February, early parts of March, when the water temperature was still kind of cool. For some reason, I guess, whenever it the water temp heetes up, I quit catching them. 00:12:48 Speaker 2: But I didn't know what they were. 00:12:50 Speaker 3: What they were, I mean, huge claws on these things, but not a whole lot of tail meat considering how big the body is, so they weren't the best for cooking. And you know, but yeah, I didn't know what I was catching there for a while. I was just throwing them out. I thought, you know, yeah, real interesting. I realized that there's definitely not just the Red Swamp crawfish or the White River there. There's more out there. So I told you before I had bought these two ponds to start farming crawfish over in the Delta. Yeah, since then, we've added on some more. We got another property with about seven ponds. These ponds kind of flooded naturally just from the way they had been kind of sitting there for a while and got a bad beaver problem. Beavers had burrowed through one of the levees. That was kind of letting some creek water dump into one of the ponds, and they were flooded naturally, you know, I guess yearly, but only to a small extent, but enough to like have this population of crawfish in there. Of course, when I made the decision to start farming them and selling them, you're kind of required to learn all about them, sure, I mean, I need to know all there is to know, which is good because just naturally just kind of obsessed with learning as much as I can about crawfish. It's a weird thing, I know, but it's not that I can't help. I don't know why, but they just fascinated me. They like you said, I mean, there's so much to learn, and they're. 00:14:17 Speaker 2: An interesting little critter. 00:14:18 Speaker 3: But what we've realized this year with our season, with some new ponds that we've got and whatnot, we were catching the heck out of blue crawfish. I mean went for a stretch of I don't know, it was probably a month long where almost every time we'd run traps, we'd catch at least one or two or even a few blue crawfish. And that was so neat matter of fact, one day, they ran a pond and about a quarter of the sack had crawfish in there that were either completely blue or they had just variations. 00:14:50 Speaker 2: Of like the blue claws or blue back. 00:14:52 Speaker 3: And then the rest of them was red and they were like just the craziest paint job on these crawfish. Yeah, you know that kind of led me down, like causes that, Yeah, why is that? And I mean the best that I can I was able to find was I mean, Google will tell you. It's like it's has something to do with what they're eating, and it's a genetic thing obviously, It's like a genetic thing that just I guess expresses itself under good habitat conditions, which told me I'm like. 00:15:20 Speaker 2: Okay, well that's great. Yeah, we're doing good, yeah, doing something right. Yeah. 00:15:24 Speaker 3: Yeah, But I never had that when we were catching crawfish and doing this thing over at the property on the Big Black River and never saw a blue and never saw a whole lot of diversity over there besides that lonesome grave digger often cutter crawfish. 00:15:38 Speaker 2: That was the only thing. 00:15:39 Speaker 3: But since kind of I've moved the thing over to the delta, it's been a lot more variation. 00:15:44 Speaker 2: I guess we'll get the blue crawfish. 00:15:45 Speaker 3: There's other species, it's I guess, like with everything else in the Delta, you know, it's just kind of a it's a unique spot, yeah, and then just the different stuff going on over there. 00:15:53 Speaker 2: Sure, but it's so fascinating. 00:15:55 Speaker 1: Fascinating stuff. Indeed, from catching crawfish that he wasn't sure of the species to coloration that indicates good habitat, sounds to me like he has a good thing going. And for real, I saw. 00:16:06 Speaker 2: A picture of this blue crawfish. It's on the YouTube version of this. 00:16:09 Speaker 1: Episode if you haven't seen it, and it's wild looking. Doesn't even look real, to be honest. It's also not surprising to me that the Mississippi Delta was a good place for the natural floodplain and the fertile soul that seems to make everything else there grow big. It's likely a good spot for crawfish too. I want to know what the process was. How did you get this farm up and going? 00:16:36 Speaker 3: I just knew from just like the cycle of how crawfish work. You know that, like almost anywhere in Mississippi where you've got a duckhole or something that's just like seasonally flooded, either when it's naturally or through you know, somebody pumping it with a well, you know, to flood for ducks or whatever, and that water's taken away at some point in the season and you've got a little dry spell there to get rid of or just naturally to prevent the population of predatory. 00:17:04 Speaker 2: Fish in there. 00:17:06 Speaker 3: You're gonna have a situation where the crawfish is at the top of the food chain, so you're gonna have there's any crawfish in there at all. Over time, that population is just gonna take off and explode. 00:17:15 Speaker 2: Interesting, and so that. 00:17:17 Speaker 3: That's kind of why I thought, well, these old catfish ponds in the Delta are perfect because the catfish are taken out of there, right and a lot of these ponds are flooded for duck hunting, and they're probably already full of crawfish. And sure enough, when I found this property with these two ponds absolutely full of crawfish already interesting and so I didn't even have to stock the ponds. No kidding, no, kid, Well that worked out. 00:17:41 Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, because that's gonna be my That was a question I had. I was like, do you bring crawfish in and hope that they keep to reproduced or like. But you didn't have to know. 00:17:49 Speaker 3: And that's what's so great about it is they do their own thing. They take care of themselves like they are. They're easy as far as I mean, unlike you know, other aquaculture like catfish. You have to feed them. Yeah, that's labor intensive. 00:18:02 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:18:03 Speaker 3: The real work comes in with harvesting them, sure, you know, and that is labor intensive and lasts for several months or a few months. But the rest of the year, I mean, you're hanging out letting them do their thing. And you know, I'm a big duck hunter, so I'm duck hunting the pines during during the winter, you know. 00:18:20 Speaker 2: So it kind of works out. 00:18:22 Speaker 1: Uh yeah, that's a gift that keeps on giving. 00:18:24 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:18:25 Speaker 3: Yeah, so I mean to me, when I started, yeah, like you trying to figure out this whole thing and thinking about it. 00:18:31 Speaker 2: You know, these old pines and Delta. 00:18:33 Speaker 3: You know, man, you already got crawfish in them, they got a well, you got all this stuff, and you know, Delta is known for having a bunch of ducks. I mean, like, okay, for me, I'm like, let's get into crawfish. 00:18:42 Speaker 1: Farm when when ye yeah, yeah, so that's that's kind of how it all started. 00:18:49 Speaker 3: I was like, let's, you know, buy a piece of property and you know, duck hunt it during the winter and harvest crawfish off there during the spring, and uh, that kind of keeps it to where you know, I'm kind of doing something I always want to do, you know, on my own, and hopefully I can generate a little bit of income. 00:19:07 Speaker 1: So do you think I mean, obviously you're saying like the harvest part of it, which I want to ask you about. 00:19:13 Speaker 2: More detailed later, but. 00:19:16 Speaker 1: A lot of these like cause in Balzona and other parts of Delta where there's these old catfish ponds, people could be very easily harvesting crawfish out of those just because of how it naturally is if they did a few different things. 00:19:30 Speaker 3: Yeah, they really don't have to do anything different. It's all about water. So they're just a flooding it seasonally just for ducks. It's already full of crawfish. They just need to get some traps. 00:19:38 Speaker 1: Hold the phone. Are you telling me that virtually every managed duck hunting spot in the Mississippi Delta is full of crawfish. What are we missing out on here? 00:19:48 Speaker 3: Yeah, it's fairly easy because, like I said, it's a byproduct of what people are already doing in the delta. Even if it's not an old catfish pond, if it's just like an empoundment of any kind that's just flooded seasonally for ducks. Now, what the crawfish are eating is all the little invertebrates and everything that are in there, those little snails and water bugs and worms. If you ever run a little dip net or something or even scoop at the bottom of your duck hole, it's just at the early part of the season. Yeah, it's usually full of those little squirmy little critters, all kinds of stuff. Yeah, and the ducks eat that stuff as well. But those things are feeding on the vegetation that grows in those ponds or those impoundments during the off season. Right during the summer months, you'll grow millet or just moist soil, you know, and that vegetation grows up, and then when it's reflooded and then starts to fall over and decay in the water, those little water bugs and invertebrates eat that detritis. I think is what they call it, that decaying plant matter, and then the crawfish feed on that, and then the crawfish will feed on like the decaying plant matter and stuff is kind of like another food source, but they're primarily eating, you know, those little in vertebrates in there. And found that my this is my opinion, I guess my belief on this that these these old catfish pond crawfish and the delta just they're bigger and they're cleaner because they are just in this environment where that that delta soul, you know, it just it's so fertile, just the same way that it grows plants and everything else, the crops so well, it grows this natural vegetation just so well in there, and the soil's just like full of those invertebrates and full of food. And so the crawfish are constantly growing and molting and that's what keeps them big and clean. 00:21:38 Speaker 2: And so the I. 00:21:40 Speaker 3: Try to tell everybody, I like, the crawfish that are coming out of these pond old catfish ponds are just the best of the best because they're just they're these ponds are smaller, you know, so you've got a smaller area that's easier to maintain the water quality and all that stuff versus a big rice field. Sure, you know, and so like I said, you kind of get a better product, you get you know, these crawfish are super healthy. Obviously with the blue crawfish thing, maybe that has something to do with it. Yeah, it's that you know, gene expression. When they're real under healthy conditions and they're eating a certain I want to say it said they were eating a certain type of algae or something that was growing in there. But all this happens when it's you know, under good you know, habitat conditions. But yeah, these Delta ponds, man, even like the duckholes, I mean, they grow just fantastic crawfish. 00:22:31 Speaker 1: Okay, so the Delta grows big and healthy crawlfish, which, like I said before, is not a surprising fact. The Mississippi Delta and its alluvial floodplain has historically always been excellent habitat for crawfish. It was one of the largest expanses of seasonally flooded bottom land forest in all of North America, which is close to ideal for crayfish crawfish habitat. It's just that over the past several years, the specific habitat structure has shifted from wild swamp and wild forest to managed agricultural landscapes and wetlands. And when landowners, farmers, duck club members, leaseholders, etc. Seasonally flood these landscapes for agriculture or duck hunting purposes, whether they mean to or not, they're turning those places back into a habitat that is more than suitable for a crawfish. Pretty cool, huh. But in terms of farming these crawfish, I know Jason said that getting a healthy number of them is easy, But something tells me that these crawfish aren't just going to jump into a purple crawfish shack and ask to be bowled on their own. So I'm curious of what that process is. 00:23:39 Speaker 3: Okay, we do it different ways. Primarily we use these things called pushboats. 00:23:45 Speaker 1: I've seen those. Yeah, Okay, it seems like a little videos of them. 00:23:48 Speaker 3: Yeah, illuminum maybe six foot boats. Got a sortin tray on there, or sorting table. We arrange the traps just in rows down These ponds are typically on a rectangle rectangular shape and just to where you're just walking down a row and you're going back and forth down the rows and typically setting out traps just depending on the pond and the population density in the pond, how many traps you want to put in there, Typically around twelve to fifteen traps per acre. I think my ponds are about six six to seven acres each, so we have about one hundred traps or so in each pie, and they're laid out in about six or seven rows, you know, about thirteen traps long. And you go down, you just come back and yeah, yeah, I mean it requires you know, waiters and walking through the water. Like I said, it's very labor intensive. Yeah, and you get late in the season, it starts getting hot, so it adds a whole nother level of you know, just intensity to it all. But I find it pretty peaceful. I love doing it, you know, I'm not in a hurry. Yeah, I love doing it with the pushboat. But we also, you know, we've got it, you know, like they do in Louisiana. I've got a hydraulic wheel boat, which is basically like a big aluminum boat propelled by a hydraulic wheel, big steel wheel, hydraulic motor. It's an amphibious boat, so you can climb levees with it. You know, you can go in any depth of water. You know, it works really good. I found that that doesn't work quite as well as the pushboats, just because they've got a wide turning radius and in these smaller ponds, you get to the end of the row and you need to do this like three point turn to turn around, which is fine in your truck, but you know, when you're doing a hydraulic wheel boat, you're having to like a lift up and then turn the wheel, and it's just kind of yeah, it's kind of better suited for you know, big rice field or that kind of how they typically do it in Louisiana. And another thing we've got is just a regular old John boat with a with a Go Devil motor on it. And luckily for me, Go Devil actually makes a version of that long tail motor. They call it the Crawfish model. It's a shorter shaft model and it's got a clutch on it, so it's not like the typical like you crank it up and the prop spending the whole time. You can let off the throttle, you know, and stop it. And so that's another way to do it. That's you know, it's it's a little easier, but of course, you know, you run into the same issue of these small ponds getting from how to get from pond to pond to pond, you know, because it can't climb a levee. So that's something we're still working on as we're expanding, Like, how, what's the best way to harvest these things? 00:26:26 Speaker 2: Is that just to have a whole bunch. 00:26:27 Speaker 3: Of pushboats or yeah, you know, or I think right now we're just kind of using a variety of everything on the pond. Sure, sure, sure, yeah. So these traps, they're they're called pyramid traps. Yeah, and you know, it's got an open hole to the tops like a plastic collar, and then the rest of it's this wire mesh with little funnels in there, and the crawfish go in there. To empty the trap, you just grab the top and you just dump it out onto the sorting table and then put it back in the water, and then you just drop your bait into that into the top of the trap, just falls down in there. 00:26:58 Speaker 1: It sounds almost like like what you're doing and it's not, I mean, not like I was expecting it to be something bad at all, but it's I didn't expect it. It sounds like almost self sustaining between the between the and I mean as far as like what you're wanting out of duck hunting and what you're wanting out of the crawfish, it sounds like they just kind of cohabitate with one another. 00:27:20 Speaker 3: Absolutely, Yeah, absolutely, I mean what's interesting. Yeah, what you're doing there to manage those places for for ducks is benefiting the crawfish too. You're doing it. Like I said, there's there's almost a complete overlap there. No, not entirely, but there is. It's a lot of overlap there that is fascinating. 00:27:37 Speaker 2: You know. 00:27:38 Speaker 3: I hope that the whole crawfish farming thing, especially the way we're doing, is it's a win all around. 00:27:44 Speaker 2: Yeah, of course, I don't think. 00:27:45 Speaker 3: I don't know if everything is, if anything out there is a win all awroyd all around, but it's it's a win on a lot of levels. 00:27:51 Speaker 2: It's as far as. 00:27:54 Speaker 3: Kind of doing something with these ponds that are already there and infrastructure is already like I said, a lot of these you know, duckholes or old ponds are already flooded for ducks. Anyway, the crawfish are there, just a matter of harvesting them out of there and hopefully generating a little bit of commerce. I guess there a business up there in the area, and you know, providing you know a Mississippi you know raised product too. Yeah, that's that's that's it's a resource. That's that's there naturally, you know. So let's like put it to use, let's do something with it, you know. And it's it's not like it's inferior, but like I said earlier, I think it's almost superior what else is out there. 00:28:36 Speaker 2: It's every bit is good. They're fantastic. 00:28:38 Speaker 1: I'm telling y'all. At no point in my life have I ever been a bigger fan of crawfish than I am right now. I just feel like they have so much to offer, from the ecological benefits we learned about last week to the incredible natural resource that we're learning about now. I just feel like they bring so much for such a small animal. Jason went on to tell me more cool facts about his operation, such as in the early season, mainly February and March, traps may only be run once or twice a week, but by the late season May through June some of these ponds get run every day, and on the productive ponds, activity by crawfish can be so high that running the same traps twice in a row kind of a double loop, still nets roughly half the first catch. That is insane to me, and it shows just how fast crawfish can repopulate a trap when the conditions are right. I also learned that commercial ponds can range anywhere from two hundred to two thousand pounds per acre in a season. That's a wide range, and it's also a big number. However, for his own operation Mississippi Crawfish Company, Jason started aiming for three hundred and fifty pounds an acre per season just to break ethan one pond jumped from five hundred and nineteen pounds an acre to over eleven hundred pounds an acre. That's pretty impressive if you ask me. And he's doing all of this in places that he's managing. Duck hunting just too cool, so fascinating, and I don't think a lot of people will realize how cool of her critter they are man well. 00:30:09 Speaker 3: Not only that, but there's so much to do. Like I said, going back to these duck holes, right and everybody floods during the fall, and you go and you duck hunt them, and then duck season's over with that, people are like pulling boards and walking away and going back to either going to turkey hunting or doing other stuff during the spring, going fishing. But there's still so much that can be done there in that duck hole catching crawfish, I mean recreationally, I'm talking about, Yeah, you know, take your kids out there and go catch your own crawfish for her own crawfish bowl. I mean, it's just as you get that same sense of satisfaction is going out and shooting a deer and coming back and cooking it, and you know how it is, it just tastes better when you when you caught it or you harvested it yourself. Crawfish are no different. It's so fun. And then you've got the frog aspect to gotten my kids into at least one of my girls really into that. But there's just so much to do there and the waterfowl or benefiting for it because they've got a place that's now maybe all this food from you know, seeds has been depleted at that point, but you've got still a huge value of like all the invertebrates are in that water, that all the hens are really needing during that time, you know, to be healthy and go back and do their thing. And so it's just that's kind of one of those things I was telling you before that I'm kind of a win win win. Maybe not a win on all levels, but there's another solid one right there that I feel like is something we're hopefully doing, at least on a small scale. 00:31:32 Speaker 1: Well, you heard the man. Take your kids out and catch them crawfish, Go and boil them yourself, have a big old time, especially if you have access to some duck hunting property. From the sound of it, those crayfish crawdads are right for the picking in those spots. And if you don't want to do that, check out Mississippi Crawfish Company. Jason has a cool thing going over there. I want to thank all of you for listening to Backwoods University as well as Bear Grease and this country life, and I hope each and every one of you out there has had as much fun as I've had learning about these crayfish, crawdads, crawfish, call them whatever you want. If you like this podcast, share it with a friend and stick around because there's a whole lot more on the way.

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