The living is easy on SC crawfish farm

James Hawthorne doesn’t have to go far to find a bit of peace and quiet.

He just steps out the back door.

“If you want to get away from civilization, this is about as far away as you can get,” Hawthorne said. “You’re about a mile from anything and there’s a mile of swamp right on the edge” he said, pointing to the tree line at the back of his property.

Hawthorne grew up on a crawfish farm bordering Pocotaligo Swamp, near Sumter, that his parents Bert and Winnie Hawthorne started in the early 1980s.

Today, he oversees Hawthorne Crawfish Farm, one of three statewide that raises crawfish.

Video: How to eat crawfish

His interest in crawfish and fishing started naturally, at a young age.

“When I was a little guy growing up, these were fishing ponds where you pay a dollar and go fishing all day,” Hawthorne said.

His father raised minnows and rainbow trout for fishing, then experimented with raising fresh water shrimp for a time. But when he went to Louisiana to attend a conference, he got hooked on the idea of raising crawfish.

But Hawthorne said his father was told “you can’t grow crawfish that far north.”

“So Daddy said, ‘Well, send me 500 pounds and I’ll see how it works.’ We’ve been dabbling in crawfish ever since then.”

Although the younger Hawthorne’s main business is earth moving – as in the construction of ponds, bridges and dams – he has kept up the crawfish business since his parents passed, raising Louisiana Red Swamp and White River varieties of the lively crustacean.

He sells to everyone, from folks who use the crawfish as feed or bait for largemouth bass to people who want to stock private crawfish ponds, to area restaurants that might run a menu special and more. At one time, Hawthorne’s crawfish were sold in the Fulton Fish Market in Bronx, New York.

“Business is up and down. Some holiday weekends, we can’t produce enough,” so Hawthorne makes trips to Louisiana during April, May and June to restock his ponds and purchase extra to resell.

When the Hawthornes began the crawfish farm in the 1980s, there were about 50 members of a South Carolina Crawfish Association. Today, there are only three crawfish farms selling to the public in South Carolina – Hawthorne’s, Elliot’s Landing in Rimini and Gowan’s in Lancaster.

The Hawthorne farm consists of 300 acres – 200 dry acres on a hill and 100 acres of swamp. Of the 100 acres, 40 acres are crawfish ponds, and the rest is planted for wildlife with corn, soybeans and sunflowers.

Crawfish are in season from April to mid-July and have been known to migrate during the summer. With the season’s heavy rains and flooding, Hawthorne jokes that his crawfish have wandered “10 miles in every direction. We don’t fence them in, they just walk up the banks and out into the swamp.”

To harvest the crawfish ponds, Hawthorne goes out once a day, every day, and pulls the traps. He’ll sort the crawfish, bag them in mesh bags and place them in a cooler (a bag holds about twenty pounds of crawfish). Then he baits the traps again with fish heads and resets them in the ponds to restart the process.

“Water temperatures get too high and most of the stock has been caught by midsummer so the ponds are drained in July. When the ponds are drained, the crawfish will pair off, bore a hole in the mud and go to ground,” Hawthorne said. “Then we’ll plant millet, rice and sorghum in the ponds.

“In September and October, we’ll flood the ponds and the crawfish will emerge with their young and forage over the winter on what was planted,” he added.

Hawthorne’s farm didn’t escape the flooding of last October.

“Six of our ponds became one big lake, about this deep,” he said, raising his hand about shoulder high. He points out sections of a dock that broke loose and came to rest in a few spots along the edge of the swamp.

“Our biggest pond became contaminated with fish that ate the crawfish from October to April,” he said. “It was only the second time in my lifetime that I’ve seen something like that.”

Riding along the top of the berm separating his ponds and farmland from the Pocotaligo Swamp, Hawthorne gestures toward the corner of the property where he and his grandsons come to fish. It’s sunny and the birds are singing.

“That’s my favorite spot right there, that’s our fishing hole. It’s about as peaceful as it gets.”

Related: Photos from last weekend's Rosewood Crawfish Festival

Related: Video from last weekend's Rosewood Crawfish Festival

Related: By the numbers on the Rosewood Crawfish Festival

Place peppercorns, coriander, clove and allspice in a spice grinder and grind for 10 to 15 seconds.

Fill a 40-quart pot with 5 gallons of water and add freshly ground spices, salt, cayenne pepper, garlic powder, paprika, onion powder, thyme, oregano, dry mustard, dill weed and bay leaves. Cover and bring to a boil over high heat, about 40 minutes.

Rinse crawfish in the bag in which they arrived to remove any excess dirt and mud. Pick out any debris or dead crawfish.

Once the water comes to a boil, add potatoes, corn, garlic and sausage. Cover and cook for 10 minutes.

Add crawfish, cover and cook for 3 minutes. Turn off heat and allow pot to sit, covered, for 10 minutes. Drain well and serve immediately.

This story was originally published May 10, 2016 at 1:27 PM with the headline "The living is easy on SC crawfish farm."