WILDSVILLE, La. &045; Jesse Evans and his workers &045; who are mostly family members &045; spent almost five hours Thursday collecting freshly laid turtle eggs on a hot, humid Louisiana day.

&uot;It’s some kind of hot out there,&uot; Evans said.

Evans owns Concordia Turtle Farms LLC, based in the small Concordia Parish community of Wildsville. It’s the company he founded 38 years ago as a part-time business when he was an offshore crew boat operator. In 1976 he quit that job and took the turtle farming business full time.

This is the busy season for the turtle business. Right now, females are laying eggs &045; about 30,000 Thursday &045; that must be collected, cleaned, dried and put in storage, where they will sit for about 60 days before they hatch.

From the end of April until about July 15, the workers at Concordia Turtle Farms will collect thousands of eggs each day.

&uot;This is the peak season,&uot; Roy Farmer said. &uot;We’ve been working hard for a while and we’re going to keep working for a while.&uot;

It makes for three months of tough work, broken up only by the occasional rainy day &045; the turtles won’t lay their eggs if it’s raining.

&uot;I’ve worked 40 days without a day off,&uot; Dorothy Millican said.

Millican washes the eggs and puts them into special storage rooms. The farm has about 75,000 breeding turtles of about 25 different species of turtles in large ponds behind the processing buildings and the house where Evans lives with his family.

Once the turtles have hatched, they are shipped out across the world. About 80 percent of Concordia Turtle’s output goes to China, nearly all of that for meat. The Asian market, where turtle meat and products are prized as food and for traditional medicinal purposes, is the world’s largest for turtles.

Because of that, Concordia Turtle is dependent on the Chinese economy for their own success. Last year prices plummeted in China, making life tough for the business. But for most of the past several years, business has been good and exports to China have made Concordia Turtle’s bottom line strong.

&uot;You get to thinking about it,&uot; Evans said. &uot;But just about every part of our economy is linked to China now. You go to Wal-Mart and almost everything there is made in China.&uot;

The farm is one of 72 licensed in Louisiana. Louisiana produces between 85 and 90 percent of the global market in pet turtles and a substantial portion of the market for meat and turtle products, like shell and leather.