An Act of Faith: The Hunter family raises crawfish

When Ben Hunter began growing crawfish as a hobby on he and his wife Amy Jo’s farm outside of Sikeston, Mo., 20 years ago, he didn’t know his passion would someday grow into a full-time operation that included owning a restaurant in Jackson. He didn’t know it would entail a move to Cape Girardeau. And he didn’t know the discouraging challenges and exhilarating freedom that would come from being on his farm, in the ponds trapping crawfish. For Ben and Amy Jo and their sons Benjamin, Joseph and Andrew, getting where they are today has been a step-by-step journey, a process of faith. One that’s still evolving.

“It energizes me every time I come out here. Before we moved to Cape, I farmed for 25-plus years. Slaves to the job. Now, this is more of a vacation,” Ben says. “Every day brings new challenges, new problems for us to solve. It’s all about solving problems. Solve those problems.”

Crawfish fall from a tub as they are transferred to a cooler for transport.Photo by Aaron Eisenhauer

Ben first became interested in raising crawfish while his father and two brothers lived in the French Quarter in New Orleans. Amy Jo says during his trips to visit them, he “fell in love with the whole process,” and the couple decided they would try their hand at growing crawfish on their farm. They began raising them in a slough on their farm and, throughout the next few years, built three additional ponds to raise the crawfish in. Now, the Hunters have four ponds spread across 10 acres where they grow and trap crawfish. Last year, they trapped 15,000 pounds. This year, Amy Jo says they have miraculously had a bumper crop and will have even more.

Although the crawfish season lasts for only three to four months of the year in Missouri, preparing for it is a year-round process. When the water gets hot, reaching 90 degrees — usually at the end of June or early July — the crawfishes’ instinct to burrow kicks in. They go into the ground and don’t come back out until the water temperature cools, usually in September or October.

While the crawfish are burrowing, Ben is still working. During July, Ben drains the ponds and plants rice, which he says “serves as a platform for the micronutrients” that provide food for the crawfish as the plants decompose, a food source that prevents the crawfish from eating each other. In the fall, when the water temperature is approximately 85 degrees, Ben puts the water back on the rice in the ponds. In the spring — the month depends on the water temperature — he begins putting out the traps in the ponds and collecting from them each day.

Amy Jo Hunter hangs on the shoulder of her son Benjamin Hunter as her husband Ben Hunter stands at the back of his truck that is loaded with coolers of freshly-caught crawfish at their farm west of Sikeston, Mo. The family turned their hobby of crawfish trapping into a business, opening Semo Crawfish Company last year.Photo by Aaron Eisenhauer

Amy Jo watches as Ben walks through the water, collecting the crawfish from the traps he’s baited with compressed vegetable byproduct from Shreveport, La. It’s the same path he walks every day.

“He loves everything [about this],” she says. “His soul is in this land.”

The same is true, she says, for their oldest son, Benjamin, who helps Ben collect the crawfish every day. He also helps clean the crawfish, as well as works at the restaurant.

“There’s nothing more peaceful,” Benjamin says of being on the farm at the crawfish ponds. “I don’t really think you can have a bad day out here.”

Ben Hunter and his son Benjamin Hunter carry in a cooler of freshly-caught crawfish at their restaurant, Semo Crawfish Company, in Jackson. The family cleans the crawfish on one side of the building and serves the crawfish to diners on the other.Photo by Aaron Eisenhauer

At the suggestion of their youngest son, the Hunters started selling the crawfish on Facebook approximately eight years ago, which helped their business grow exponentially. Three years ago, they began working on the restaurant project. Through prayer, Amy Jo says she felt God ask her and her family to take a leap of faith and move to Cape Girardeau County, even though she didn’t know why. So, they did.

“I would lay in bed at night in the new house, and I would say, ‘Okay, God, you’ve brought us here, and we are here — I’ve taken this leap of faith, but what is it we’re supposed to do?’ And every night I’d pray in bed, and every night, I would get the same thing that came back to me: ‘What are you good at as a family?’” Amy Jo recalls. “And I would say, ‘Well, really the only thing we do together as a family is crawfish.’”

Benjamin Hunter and his father Ben Hunter empty sacks of field-grade crawfish into the purging tanks where they will remain for 12 to 24 hours. The crawfish are rinsed with clean water, removing mud and giving the crawfish time to purge their intestinal tracts.Photo by Aaron Eisenhauer

Although she was frustrated with that response because she couldn’t see where it was going, she wrote a business plan for a restaurant amidst a cold spring that was detrimental to their crawfish harvest. To make up for the lack of their own harvest, they brought up crawfish from Louisiana, and their business doubled in size. Amy Jo’s plan had been for a food trailer. With this growth, she realized this project was bigger than that. They bought a building with garage doors, because that was what she says she could see in her vision for a brick-and-mortar restaurant. They rehabbed it, and, in June 2020 in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, they opened SEMO Crawfish Company Boilhouse and Market in Jackson.

In addition to the restaurant, this location is where they process the crawfish. There, they wash the crawfish in the wash tank Ben designed, vats Benjamin describes as a “bathtub” of sorts, where the crawfish are dumped into baskets. After 12 to 24 hours of being washed, Ben uses a rope on a swivel system to pull the basket into the air, dumping the crawfish onto a stainless steel culling table where, with a squeegee, he and Benjamin separate the live crawfish from any that have died before scooping the crawfish into the holes at each end of the table, so they fall into the bags attached below it. Once the bags are full, each contain approximately 30 pounds of crawfish, and they’re ready to be sold to individuals or boiled at the restaurant.

Benjamin Hunter weighs a sack of live crawfish after they've been thoroughly cleaned. After being cleaned and weighed, the crawfish are stored in a cooler where they are kept alive in a dormant state.Photo by Aaron Eisenhauer

Amidst the unknowns and uncontrollables of raising crawfish, Ben says the process has grown his faith.

“Put it in God’s hands and don’t worry. I guess that’s the biggest thing about it,” Ben says of what he’s learned from raising crawfish throughout the years. “Give it your 110%. As long as when you go to bed at night, you know that you gave it 110%, even though it doesn’t look like it’s going to work out, it will. Some way, somehow, it works out.”