Nobody Knew Why She Flooded the Bottom Field for Crawfish — Until 1993 Silenced the County
Nobody Knew Why She Flooded the Bottom Field for Crawfish — Until 1993 Silenced the County On a Tuesday morning in March of 1989, a twenty-three-year-old named Nora Tesdall stood at the head of her family's 40-acre bottom field in Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana, opened the water control structure her father had called a waste of lumber, and began flooding ground that her neighbors had been planting in soybeans for thirty years. The Tesdall bottom field had produced an average of 28 bushels of soybeans per acre for eleven consecutive years at an average net return of $47 per acre — $1,880 per season on 40 acres — and was sitting in the October flood plain of the Red River looking, by March of 1989, like a field that was going to produce soybeans for another eleven years unless something changed. The Avoyelles Parish extension agent told Nora in 1988 that crawfish production required infrastructure investment she didn't have and market relationships she hadn't built; a Rapides Parish crawfish producer she contacted in January of 1989 told her the bottom field's soil composition was wrong for natural pond production and quoted her $14,000 to install a clay-lined commercial pond as an alternative; and her father's bank declined to extend operating credit for a crawfish operation with no production history, which left her with the water control structure, 40 acres, and no budget. Nora reflooded the natural bottom field in October of 1989, stocked it with 40 pounds of crawfish brood stock at $1.20 per pound, and harvested 3,200 pounds at $0.68 per pound the following spring — and Dale Crowley, who had farmed 600 acres of Avoyelles Parish row crops for twenty-two years and held the adjacent property, told the co-op counter that he'd seen a lot of ways to ruin a bottom field, but flooding it for crawfish was the most creative. A natural Louisiana bottom field with clay subsoil, seasonal flooding, and existing aquatic vegetation is not a failed soybean field — it is an uncultivated crawfish habitat operating below its biological potential because no one has introduced brood stock and managed the water cycle. The infrastructure already exists in the soil profile and the hydrology; the production cost is brood stock, water control, and harvest labor, which is a fundamentally different economic structure than a row crop that requires annual seed, fertilizer, herbicide, and machinery costs on ground that floods every other year anyway. This story is drawn from Louisiana State University AgCenter crawfish production research, USDA agricultural census data for Avoyelles Parish, and oral histories of the Louisiana crawfish farming industry from the 1980s through 1990s. Characters and events are dramatized for storytelling purposes. Have you ever watched a piece of ground get farmed against its natural tendency for decades before someone finally asked what it actually wanted to grow? What's the most productive thing you've ever stopped fighting and started working with? Share below. #AvoyellesParishCrawfish #BottomFieldProduction #LouisianaCrawfishFarming #FloodItDontFightIt #1993SilencedTheCounty
He Bought a “Useless” Swamp Farm at Auction — His Ducks Found What the County Maps Missed
They Cut Off the Single Mom_s Water—Then Her Secret Well Made Their Farms Beg
HOA Built a Bike Path on My Cattle Land… Then Got Sued Into Oblivion
They Laughed at Her 200 Scrawny Geese — Until the Frost Killed Every Crop but the Ones They Guarded
The Fish Market Left Its Scrap to Rot by Her Fence — 4 Years Later Her Vegetables Won the State Fair
They Called the Single Mom’s $2 Farm a Scam—Then Its Forgotten Orchard Produced a $22M Harvest
Everyone Laughed at His 35 Dwarf Goats — Until They Cleared the Slope to a Buried Apple Grove
They Laughed When She Planted Black Locust — Then Drought Hit and Only Her Cattle Had Shade and Feed
Her Neighbor Dumped a Truckload of Old Wool on Her Driveway...She Turned It Into a Waiting List
They Laughed When She Bought the Auction's Worst Irrigation Pump—Then the River Dried Up
The County Couldn’t Sell the 63 Overgrown Acres—Then Her Goats Found a Stone Well
She Bought 30 Greenbrier Choked Acres at Auction — Her Pigs Rooted It Down to an Old Cider Mill
They Laughed When the Little Girl Wouldn't Drain the Bog — Until the Drought Came
I Denied HOA Officers Access to My Property — Shocked When I Prove Ownership and Said ＂NOT in HOA "
She turned 200 goats loose on the thorn hill no one could tame — two years later the neighbors.
They Poured Good Milk Into Her Ditch for 9 Years—She Turned It Into Award-Winning Cheese
Kicked Out at 18, She Bought an Abandoned Motel For $10 — What She Found in Room 7 Shocked...
They Gave Him a Worthless Rocky Hill — Then Drought and Flood Destroyed Every Farm but His
They Laughed When She Bought a Swamp Nobody Wanted...Then She Built a Farm That Fed a Whole Town
