[Image: push boat]‘Push boats’ help crawfish farmer cut costs
IOTA – Acadia Parish farmer Gerard Frey figures he has cut costs and increased production of crawfish by using push boats instead of mechanized watercraft to harvest his crop.
Among the reasons, he said, is that it’s inevitable a motorized boat will run over several traps during harvest, and those traps cost $7.35 each. Frey uses 7,500 traps on 350 acres.
"It got to the point I was replacing 20 percent of my traps a year," he said.
A worker using a push boat wades in the water, and the boat is human-powered – which is slower but allows a harvester more time to place the trap in the water with no chance of it falling over. Frey believes his traps last longer that way, because they aren’t yanked out of the water from a moving boat.
Frey’s push boats have rods that serve as anchors to prevent the wind from blowing them off course when a worker stops to pick up a trap.
One of the main reasons he made the switch to push boats was to save his land, he said. The big motorized paddlewheel boats cut big ruts in the field, and the ruts get wider and deeper with each pass of the boats.
That disturbance creates expensive problems when it comes time to plant a rice crop, he said, explaining that the fields used for crawfish also are used to grow rice.
Even though the depressions from motorized boats were being backfilled, the soil doesn’t have time to compact, according to Frey, who said the result is a soft area where machinery can get stuck. "The land literally does not heal," he said.
Frey keeps one hydraulic paddle wheeler that can be used to help catch up on orders, but he tries to keep its use to a minimum. He believes that the larger motorized boats kill crawfish as they drag the muddy bottom.
Ray McClain, an LSU AgCenter crawfish specialist at the Rice Research Station in Crowley, said no research has been conducted – although he said he’s confident crawfish are quick enough to avoid being run over by the slow-moving boats.
"One county agent, several years ago, got down on his hands and knees on several occasions and followed a wheeled push boat for a ways and could not find a single dead crawfish as a result of the boat," McClain said.
McClain said push boats, which cost less but require more labor, traditionally have been used on small ponds.
Bruce Schultz
Sugarcane rind shows promise as building material
LSU AgCenter researchers recently completed a study that shows promise for the economic feasibility of using sugarcane rind as a supplemental raw material for manufacturing oriented strand board (OSB) and similar products.
Structural wood-based composites such as OSB are gaining increased use in both residential and commercial applications, said Qinglin Wu, the Roy O. Martin Sr. Professor of Composites/Engineered Wood Products in the LSU AgCenter’s School of Renewable Natural Resources. They are widely used as sheathing, flooring and I-joist materials in construction.
With the cost of wood fibers more than doubling in the past 20 years, alternative materials for OSB production are being studied, Wu said.
"The technology is there. Someone would have to invest either in a stand-alone facility or an add-on to a processing facility," said Richard Vlosky, director of the LSU AgCenter’s Louisiana Forest Products Development Center.
Wu said a separation facility adjacent to a sugar mill could divide the cane into its various parts, supplying juice to the mill while the rind could be shipped off t[Image: vlosky & wu photo.jpg]o be used for OSB.
"The potential is there," Wu said. "A lot of components can be extracted – though some technical issues have to be worked out."
Vlosky said a survey indicated growers are looking at alternative uses for sugarcane.
"Almost nine out of 10 growers said they would grow sugarcane for rind production if it was more profitable than growing sugarcane for sugar," Vlosky said. "The product itself is solid from a structural standpoint. A 50-50 combination of sugarcane rind and wood is actually stronger than just wood alone."
The research was jointly funded by the American Sugar Cane League and Louisiana Economic Development.
Rick Bogren
Sugarcane rind shows promise as building material.
Highway construction moves a lot of dirt around, and with construction comes the potential for erosion.
Louisiana’s Department of Transportation and Development uses silt fences and hay bales to slow erosion and improve water filtration and quality, but members of DOTD are investigating the
use of compost in filter "socks" for erosion control on state and private highway projects.
The LSU AgCenter’s Callegari Environmental Center, which specializes in composting, brought together members of DOTD, the state Department of Environmental Quality and representatives of agencies in Texas who use these compost systems.
Callegari coordinator Bill Carney said the compost filter sock system is more effective than conventional methods.
"Silt fences are skimpy. They don’t hold up," he said. "If you get a flow against them, the flow blows them over, so erosion keeps on going and the sediment keeps on flowing. But you don’t get that with the filter sock."
With the filter sock system, various types of compost are pumped into large socks, which can be used along eroding road banks or placed around construction sites. Compost can be made from yard trimmings, ag[Image: Filter Sock 6560.jpg]ricultural byproducts such as bagasse or rice hulls, or even biosolids such as highly treated sewage sludge.
"They’ll use compost and wood chips in this sock, and they vary the degree of compost as compared to wood chips to vary the degree of filtration," Carney said.
A unique feature of a filter sock is it does not need to be removed once on a site.
"It will support plant growth," Carney said. "So you don’t have to go back in and tear it all up and disturb the land once again to get it out of there."
Carney sees potential for economic development through the creation of businesses to supply the compost for the socks. When the Texas Department of Transportation and Development started using compost systems, there was only one compost supplier, Carney said. Now there are 18. Carney believes the same can happen in Louisiana.
DOTD’s new-product evaluation committee will be testing the compost filter socks.
Tobie Blanchard