Sunday, April 5, 2009

Toxic environment?

FIGHTING DESTINY

Long day yesterday. I got lucky 'cause CFM needed help at the crawfish trailer and most of the mail carriers had from 17 to 72 certified letters. Each one has to be written up separately, sorted by order of the route, delivered and scanned or attempted delivered and scanned, in addition to all the regular mail and packages. It would have taken me forever! But I only had three. Whew! Of course CFM was too busy to answer his cell so the phone was ringing while I was trying to concentrate on the route. Ended up having to go back and rerun some of the route to deliver 5 packages I missed. But I was able to get done earlier than everyone else and get to the CF shack to help.



Not a great day sales wise and it should have been. Prices are too high yet, people want big crawfish(and we're lucky to get ANY) and many are out of work especially in the oilfield.

I found out later in the day from one of our local suppliers that most of the local crawfish growers are getting desperate. Some of them are getting barely enough crawfish to reseed their ponds much less to sell. And this is prime selling season. CFsupplier said he doesn't know what is going on. He really thought it was mostly because the babies were drowned when water came up after hurricanes. But CFM's thinking that possibly the hurricanes going back to 2005 pulled in toxic whatevers from the south and dropped them on the waters and land to the north. This map shows flooding from Gustav. It makes sense. I'm wondering if any environmentalists have looked into it.

Our garden since the hurricanes has not produced anything - not one tomato, not one squash. The greens barely broke through the ground. No one has caught any significant number of fish in the bayou in the last three years. Crawfish season was down in the south immediately after, many put it down to salt water invading the fresh. Surely that was part of it but there may be something much bigger going on.

This is particularly scary since many people are trying to supplement their food budget by growing their own gardens. And very few in Louisiana and Mississippi are having success. I'll have to see what I can find out.

Morning update: Man, CFM can't catch a break! It's Easter week, the biggest week of crawfish season and we have a freeze coming Tuesday morning. This is bound to affect the catch for the days following. Our supplier had said that he didn't think he'd have a problem with supplying what we asked for this year. Normally, there aren't enough to go around on Easter. But of course, purchases are way down too. Now, we'll have to see. At the very least it may throw the little buggers into a molt which means well, who knows. Lots of question marks this year!

1 comment:

Leah Braemel said...

Wow. So it's not just the crawfish. From the sounds of it, you may be onto something re the toxic/pesticides/whatever. Three years is a long time impact.