McEnery Turtle Farm
By George Sims

    Macon LaFoe farms a couple thousand acres of cotton and corn, and David Barnes is the director of administration for the City of Monroe.  You’d really think that these guys would have enough to keep them busy.

    Be that as it may, they put their heads together three years ago, and are now the founders and co-owners of the McEnery Turtle Farm in southern Morehouse Parish, home to some 32,000 reptilian souls.

    Turtle farming in Louisiana, according to the office of the state veterinarian, which oversees the licensing and regulation of these enterprises, is a rapidly expanding industry, with eighty-nine registered farms currently in the state.  Barnes and LaFoe’s babies are red-eared sliders (Trachemys scripta elegans), which were once sold everywhere as “pet turtles”.  By 1975, however, epidemiologists discovered that these beloved pets were carriers of Salmonella food poisoning, and often transmitted the disease to children, who apparently had a bad habit of kissing their little turtle mouths.

    Although LaFoe says that Louisiana is the only state to produce a Salmonella-free turtle, federal regulations continue to prohibit the sale of hatchling turtles within the United States  The entire harvest, therefore, with the exception of those used for research, are exported outside the country, with China being the primary importer.  In recent years, Chinese markets have purchased ten to twelve million turtles annually, for human consumption.  The Chinese buyers usually purchase turtles in lots of at least 100,000, and the hatchlings are packaged, and then shipped by plane. 

    I visited with Macon LaFoe on an afternoon in June, at the farm, which is immaculately maintained.  Two enclosed ponds, one covering an acre, and the other almost twice as large, border the entrance road, beyond which lie feed storage bins, incubation and processing rooms, and equipment areas.

    This is the third year of operation for the LaFoe/Barnes operation, and workers were making their way slowly around the perimeter of one pond, shovels and baskets in hand. We stepped over the solid fence surrounding the pond, and I noticed that the banks were covered with long tentlike structures, formed by bending a piece of galvanized roofing lengthwise.  Beginning about “cotton planting time” (mid-April) until early July, the females climb the banks of the pond, seeking shelter under the structures to lay their “clutches” of eggs. The adult turtles, some 16,000 per pond, were all obtained from licensed trappers, and constitute the breeding stock for the farm.

    Every day, five or six seasonal employees carefully uncover the previous night’s eggs, placing them into wire baskets, and transporting them inside to be washed, disinfected, and placed into incubation containers. On the day I visited, workers told me they’d already gathered over 67,000 eggs since April 13, with nearly 3,000 collected on one particular day.

    An all-terrain vehicle engine cranks up, and at the sound, thousands of turtle heads pop up in one area of the pond.  It’s feeding time, and the animals hear (or sense) the machine that brings them their supper.  The vehicle tows a feed hopper, with a motor which shoots the turtle food (essentially catfish food, with a different protein content, plus a fish oil attractant) out into the water.  The water boils as the turtles race toward the floating feast. LaFoe and Barnes feed their turtles from March/April until September, when the sliders become dormant during the winter months.

    Gennie Barnes, David’s daughter, takes us into the incubation room, where she explains that the eggs require 65-70 days to hatch.  She removes one of the plastic cases from the shelves that line the wall, and proudly displays the results of the first day’s collection (April 13).  Three of the babies have already emerged.  She flips one onto his back, pointing out the swollen umbilical region that protrudes pinkly from the plastron (lower shell).  This area contains embryonic nutrients that will sustain the baby turtle through the first weeks of its life, before it begins to eat on its own.

    “So the Chinese buy these turtles for food?” I asked.  “How does a red-eared slider taste?”  Macon and Gennie looked at each other, not exactly in horror, but they weren’t licking their lips either. “We don’t know. We’ve never tried one.”   

This article is reprinted from Louisiana Road Trips Magazine, July 2006 issue.