BATON ROUGE -- With Thanksgiving over, it's almost time for a season that nearly every person in Louisiana's appetite is craving: crawfish season.

Todd Fontenot, a crawfish agent who works with the LSU AgCenter, tells WBRZ he's been talking to crawfish farmers around the state to learn how this season will compare to last season.

He says this year's outlook is much better.

"We're seeing a lot of newly hatched crawfish emerging. We didn't see this happen until mid to late December, and in some places, January last year," Fontenot said.

According to Fontenot, most crawfish production in the state follows rice crop production. Once it gets late in the year, the rice fields are flooded for crawfish farming.

"The ponds were flooded up in October. Shortly after that, we could see crawfish emerging from their burrow. They looked young and so they spread that young out into the fields to grow," Fontenot said.

He calls it a stark contrast to last season, which was hampered by one of the driest and hottest summers in state history.

"Just baked the ground basically and we believe we lost a lot of crawfish in their burrows. We believe a lot of crawfish did not emerge from their burrows, and we believe the number of crawfish coming out of the burrow, being that they were so delayed, were reduced." Fontenot said.

WBRZ spoke to one Baton Rouge seafood spot that's already been able to sell its first crawfish of the year. B&T Seafood received its first shipment of crawfish of the season this week from one of the farms it partners with. The line to get them was out the door.

"We didn't find out until the morning of. So it usually doesn't start until January, but we got lucky. We had 15 sacks and sold out in an hour and a half, so people are ready for them," B&T Seafood's Thao Sawyer said.

B&T Seafood says that last year's season started with them selling crawfish at $14.99 a pound. The start of this year's season had them selling at $10.99 a pound, which they say is an indicator of a good crawfish season.