Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Companion Planting Rice and Crawfish, Crowley LA (March 18, 2014)





The Place


The region around Crowley LA is located in the Cajun prairie (can you say flat, flat, flat?) and is subdivided into rectangular fields, some flooded and some dry.  In some of the flooded fields you see tidy rows of red or white circular tops of crawfish traps.  They grows rice in the paddies, and then rest the paddies for a season by growing crawfish in them.  Beside (or in) the paddies stand snowy, white egrets.  Apparently egrets like crawfish, too.



The Adventure

We went on a tour of the Crystal Rice Heritage Farm.  The farm grows rice and crawfish.  They also makes the “enrichment” vitamins that gets put on rice after all the vitamins are stripped off when they make it “white” in the mill.  The farm was founded in 1890, and according to the tour guide, the founder developed the first domestic rice seed, previously rice growers had to import their seed. 

When you think of it, crawfish and rice make a perfect couple, not only on the dinner plate but in farming. Crawfish need water and so does rice. So the food chain goes a little like this:
1) Rice provides a continual influx of plant fragments that are in turn consumed by bacteria and other microorganisms; and
2) Crawfish consume a high quantity food such as epiphytic organisms and invertebrates which can survive in this wet food rich environment.  
Voila, crawfish boil and dishes such as crawfish etouffee, gumbo, bisque, boudin …..

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