Take a Look Inside of the Largest Crawfish Farm in Louisiana
You know all those delicious crawfish we love to eat every season? Here's a bird's eye view into how Louisiana's largest crawfish farm gets those mudbugs from the rice fields to your table.
Louisiana's Biggest Crawfish Farm
According to eater.com, Frugé Aquafarms and Cajun Crawfish in Branch, Louisiana holds the honor of being Louisiana's largest crawfish farm.
At a whopping 3,500 acres, Frugé Seafood Company produces between 1 million and 3 million pounds of crawfish each season.
Starting well over 40 years ago, Mike and Mark Frugé have grown their crawfish farm from 20 acres into a "local company with global reach."
Over at cajuncrawfish.com, they not only sell crawfish, but they sell just about anything you can imagine that has anything to do with crawfish.
Dips, crawfish washing tubs, crawfish tail meat, seasonings, and even crawfish trays.
If you're from Louisiana, especially Acadiana, you already have a good idea of how the whole crawfish farming thing works.
However, Mike and Mark Frugé have taken their love of eating crawfish to a pretty amazing global operation that needs to be seen to fully appreciate.
You see, they don't just sell crawfish, they broker crawfish.
From frugeseafood.com -
"Over the years, Frugé Aquafarms, Inc. was created to broker and market live crawfish, the farm’s principal crop. Ultimately we realized a specialized distribution arm was needed to coordinate moving this highly perishable product, and Frugé Seafood Company was born!"
Eater.com 'Dan Does' Farms Crawfish At Frugé Aquafarms
Daniel Geneen from the foodie website eater.com and YouTube host of "Dan Does" took a trip down to Branch, Louisiana to see exactly what goes into farming millions of pounds of crawfish.
From Eater's YouTube Channel -
Rice farmers like Mike Frugé of Cajun Crawfish in Louisiana figured out that the two-year growing cycle of crawfish synced perfectly with the two-year cycle of the rice crop. He shows us how his rice fields are seeded with baby crawfish every other year, creating a new source of food and income for farmers in the area.
Mike Frugé takes Geneen out in the rice fields to learn how to catch crawfish, to the processing plant to teach how crawfish are graded, separated and sacked, and then eventually they show him how to cook those delectable crustaceans he worked hard to catch.
To Louisianians, although these are familiar images, the scenes in the video are fun and interesting to watch.
To someone who isn't familiar with crawfish or crawfish farming, we're pretty sure this video may as well be an episode of The X-Files.
From eater.com -
Frugé takes Geneen out into the fields to empty the crawfish traps into a manual push boat. From there, the crawfish are added to the conveyer belt where they’re washed and sorted. The small ones get sent back into the fields to grow and reproduce for the next crop, and the larger ones are sent out to customers.
Check out the video below with all of the crawfish magic and read more over at eater.com.
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Gallery Credit: Joni Sweet