Which state's farms sell the most crawfish, shrimp and crabs? 🦞
1Guess
A crustacean wears its skeleton on the outside and walks on jointed legs — crawfish, shrimp, crabs. Plenty are caught wild, but these ones are farmed, and USDA adds up what the farms sold in a year. Which state's farms sold the most? Tap the states most-to-least.
Tapping assigns 1→4 in order
Shellfish means ocean. Florida! 🐾
2Answer
The real order is…
Louisiana — $122,461,000 of farm-raised crustaceans, out of $175,746,000 for the whole country. That is about seven of every ten dollars, and 5.32× the next state. Now the part that spoils the picture in your head: almost all of that money is crawfish, and a crawfish is a freshwater animal that lives in a flooded field. USDA prints a crawfish-only line too, and for Louisiana it is more than 99% of the state's crustacean total. Meanwhile Hawaii, an island surrounded by ocean, is second with $23,011,000, and Florida is third with $21,793,000. Sitting next to salt water is not what wins this table. Being able to flood a field and drain it again is.
📚 BackgroundAlmost every dollar on Louisiana's line comes from one animal, the crawfish — and a crawfish farm is usually a field. The LSU AgCenter's rice research station explains the pairing: “rice plays such an integral part in the farming of crawfish, either within highly effective rice-crawfish crop rotation systems or as the single most important forage crop planted to provide a food resource for culturing crawfish with no intention of grain harvesting.” The farming itself is really a water schedule. Crawfish aquaculture “relies on control of pond hydrology to simulate optimal wet and dry conditions occurring in natural riverine and wetland habitats,” and the animals “grow and mature during the wet or flooded cycle and survive the dry periods by digging burrows.” The star of the industry is the Louisiana red swamp crawfish (Procambarus clarkii), which the AgCenter says “dominates in the culture industry and is most desired in the marketplace.”(LSU AgCenter (Louisiana State University Agricultural Center), H. Rouse Caffey Rice Research Station — Aquaculture; “Crawfish Production: Production Systems and Forages”)
Note: this is money from farm-raised crustaceans, from USDA's 2023 Census of Aquaculture — a count taken once every five years. Crawfish, shrimp and crabs caught wild, out of a bayou or out at sea, are not in this number. USDA NASS. USDA printed a crustacean-sales figure for 9 states. Thirteen more — Texas, California and Alabama among them — are withheld because too few farms are behind them to publish without revealing an individual farm, and the other 28 states are not in the table at all. Everything the withheld states could hold together is far smaller than any of the top three figures, so first, second and third place here are national positions. Below third place the numbers get small, and a withheld state could sit anywhere, so read the tail as the order among the states with a printed number.
USDA NASS Quick Stats: CRUSTACEANS - SALES, MEASURED IN $, 2023 Census of Aquaculture, by state (2026-08-22) — Published values only (the committed raw file holds the API response verbatim). USDA printed a crustacean-sales figure for 9 states. Thirteen more — Texas, California and Alabama among them — are withheld because too few farms are behind them to print a number without giving those farms away, and the other 28 states are not in the table at all. Everything the withheld states could hold together is far smaller than any of the top three figures, so first, second and third place here are national positions — a check this site re-runs on every build. Below third place the numbers get small, and a withheld state could sit anywhere, so read the tail as the order among the states with a printed number.
↳ In Quick Stats, pick CRUSTACEANS / CRUSTACEANS - SALES, MEASURED IN $, Census year 2023, Total domain, and compare states.