Picture 7,000 pounds of food deemed unfit for human consumption-raw cow livers and kidneys, duck necks, broken eggs, fish heads, hamburger patties that fell off a delivery truck-just sitting there, with no place to go. It is not pretty.
The food is slapped into the bottom of a grinder large enough to house a car. The grinder should be mashing it together to make an animal brew, but it’s broken, and feed production on Ron Gengel’s farm has ground to a halt. With 15,000 mouths to feed, Gengel cannot afford to let deadlines slip away.
Gengel, 57, is a mink farmer. A broken grinder (fixed later that afternoon) is a typical crisis amid the day-to-day challenges in keeping the ranch up and running, he explained.
And though the end product produced through his efforts is glamorous, the process of getting there is anything but.
Feeding and watering the animals and caring for them in sickness and health, takes good old-fashioned farm labor-and plenty of it.
This type of farm, however, has become a rarity not only in Lake County but across the country. In the ’50s, when Gengel started his business, mink breeding was a lot more common. There were 7,000 mink breeders in the United States then, 55 in Lake County alone. Today, mink farms are dwindling. In 1992 there were 800 U.S. farms, and the Lake County count was down to five.
Whether due to the animal-rights campaign or simply to the global economic downturn, the bottom line isn’t in dispute: the industry is in a slide. But there remain the few determined farmers such as Gengel, who not only intends to succeed but to pass the business to the next generation.
“The job is 24 hours a day,” said the soft-spoken farmer as he led a visitor on a ranch tour on a chilly day. “A mink consumes one-fourth of its weight each day, and it takes 110 pounds of food to produce each pelt,” Gengel said.
The first stop on the tour was the animal cages. The long, slender mammals, about the size of an otter or a thin skunk, weigh 3 to 6 pounds. At the Gengel farm, the minks are housed in cages lined up in 32 wooden shelters. They have a roof over their heads to keep them dry and their own thick coats to keep them warm. The animals are rarely handled, Gengel said. Food is dropped into the wire cages through the top, and the animals’ waste drops out the bottom.
For protection, Gengel dons heavy gloves to pluck one out of its cage. The animal is sleek, beautiful and ready to bite. Reaching in through the door on top, he snatched a black mink by the tail “like you catch a snake” and secured his hold by wrapping his other hand around the back of its neck.
As the animal twisted to try to nip the arm that restrained it, Gengel ran a gloved finger down its back to show off the thick coat that has made it a choice species for exotic fur garments. Its hairs are so tightly packed, they are almost impossible to separate.
“They look cute, but their personality is mean,” Gengel cautioned. He should know. After more than 30 years in the business, he has experienced more bites than he cares to remember, including one on the nose.
“Like any wild animal, its instinct is to attack when it feels threatened,” he said.
If you are thinking right about now that you might want to start your own mink farm, you are probably too late. Training for most farmers begins shortly after birth. They literally as well as figuratively follow in their fathers’ footsteps to learn the trade.
A mink farmer must be at once a nutritionist, veterinarian, farmer, salesman, businessman, mechanic, genetic scientist and industry cheerleader. He must know the right blend of liver and chicken to feed the animals at a particular time in the season, possess the business sense to negotiate the best price for their skins at season’s end and make savvy breeding decisions about which females are saved to give birth to the next year’s crop.
All that expertise comes from years of on-the-job training. “I’ve seen people with a lot of money buy a farm, and it didn’t work because they didn’t know what to do,” Gengel said. “You can’t be in this business for the money. You have to love the work.”
Gengel’s father started in the business in 1941, and Gengel followed in 1957, raising his own minks in outside cages on rented land in Bensenville. Back then, Bensenville’s main roads were gravel, but Gengel could see that the area was rapidly developing.
Seeking space for expansion, and a more rural setting, in 1959 he and wife Joanne bought the 60-acre farm near Lake Villa, which includes the family home.
Mink farms are measured by the number of breeding females kept for the next year’s breeding. Each female averages four offspring per year. With 3,100 females, Gengel’s farm is the county’s largest.
Another Lake County producer is the Imperial Mink Ranch in Wadsworth, owned by Jeff Serdar, 51, who runs the business with help from his son and a brother. His sister, Pat Page, runs Harriet’s Imperial Furs, a store at the 50-acre site where she sells garments made from the pelts raised on the farm.
Like Gengel, Serdar followed his father into the field. “His whole life was the animals,” Serdar said of his father, who died in 1991 at age 78. The elder Serdar started in the business in 1936, formulating mink feed for other farmers, which eventually led to his raising his own animals.
“He started out with 30 minks he kept in the alley of a North Chicago apartment, but the neighbors didn’t like that much,” Serdar recalled. He then bought the Wadsworth farm, where he continued to manufacture feed as well as raise minks. “The feed and mink business grew up together,” said Serdar.
The mink pelt production cycle from mating to harvest takes one year and follows nature’s own life-and-death circle. Babies, tiny as a finger, are born in April and May, when the earth begins anew. They feed off their mothers’ milk for the first month, then begin to chow down solid food that spurs an eating and growing frenzy.
“By the end of June they are as big as their mothers,” Gengel said.
When full grown, the animals would fight too much if left together, so by July they are separated into individual pens. They stay there until they are killed during the harvest season, which runs December through February.
A great irony of the business is that while the short-term objective is to care for the animals-clean them, feed them, keep them healthy-the long-range plan is to kill them. The irony is not lost on Serdar, who said he loves the minks but accepts the killing as “an unfortunate part of the process.”
“This is not a cold-blooded business. A person who didn’t care about them wouldn’t be there for them,” he said. “I try to put it out of my mind that they have to die. I don’t think about the pelting until it comes. But that’s the way it is.”
The animals are killed (gassed with carbon monoxide), then skinned, and the coats are stretched to dry, tasks all performed right on the farm. The skins are shipped to the state of Washington and sold at the Seattle Fur Exchange, which ranks them according to quality and auctions them off twice a year, February and May. (Carcasses are sold to food processors for animal feed.)
Mink pelts from Lake County consistently rank high, according to David Bavins, marketing manager for the exchange. “Some of the best minks in the world come from that area,” he said, attributing the success to genetics and the feed supply.
Good feed is essential to raising high-grade minks, agreed Serdar, who said formulas developed by his father years ago are largely responsible for the quality fur the region produces today.
Quality aside, this year the number of Lake County mink farms will drop to four from five. “I’ll pelt out this year,” said farmer Doug Henderson, which means he will liquidate the business by turning all his animals into fur, saving no females for future production.
For the last 10 years the North Chicago resident has raised minks on a five-acre Gurnee plot owned by his grandmother. As a boy, he watched his grandparents farm minks on the land and learned the trade. A self-proclaimed Davy Crockett, Henderson said he was always a fur trapper at heart.
“I was born 100 years too late,” he said. Although he will miss the animals, he said, he “won’t miss losing money. I love it, but I’m not a fool.”
Henderson, 37, has fallen victim to a worldwide mink recession. Sales have dropped dramatically in recent years and with it the price of mink pelts. Skins that would have sold for $65 seven years ago will now bring a farmer $35.
Animal-rights organizations claim victory for the decline, saying their fur protests have directly affected sales. “The mink industry is in a tailspin, and we have made a tremendous impact on sending sales downward,” said Steven Simmons, spokesman for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
“We have made fur a social liability,” he said. Thanks to the negative publicity campaigns waged by activists, Simmons said, many well-known designers have stopped working with fur, television game shows no longer give away fur coats as prizes, and soap opera stars have ceased wearing real fur coats in their scenes. “Fur has lost its glamor,” he said.
Though the two groups are diametrically opposed, Lake County farmers said they never have been directly confronted by animal-rights groups. Simmons acknowledged that his organization has left farmers alone.
“We target the retailers,” he said. “Our method has been to decrease demand.”
He was quick to add, however, that the organization in no way approves of the mink farms. “The very premise of a fur farm is cruel.”
“No one approves of the mistreatment of animals,” Serdar said. “But the farm minks are not mistreated. They are kept healthy and happy.
“Raising animals to kill and use is what farming is about,” he said. “When you eat dinner, do you feel sorry for the chickens? I grew up with nature and have seen a lot of life and death. It’s hard to explain. I love the animals, yet I love to hunt.”
Gengel is philosophically accepting of the protest groups that would like to shut down his business. “Anyone has a right to protest fur; it doesn’t bother me, really,” he insisted. Yet he is sharply critical of militant groups that have destroyed laboratory equipment and reseach data because animals were used in the research.
“That really bothers me,” he said. “When they ruin tests that could be used to help humans, they have gone too far.”
Industry insiders disagree that animal-rights groups are fully responsible for the downturn in the popularity of fur. “Not 100 percent true,” said Serdar, who asserted that worldwide economic troubles are the industry’s biggest enemy. “Eighty percent of American fur goes overseas. Japan is our biggest (customer), so their recession has really hurt us.”
Furriers and farmers also trace the industry’s problems to overproduction in the last 10 years that brought lower prices and decreased profits. World production went from 27 million pelts in 1987 to 42 million just two years later.
“The industry is cyclical,” Bavins theorized. “It has hit bottom and it will soon start to rise.”
One thing both sides do agree on is that the industry is hurting and that many farmers will be forced to bail out. “There is a mass exodus,” Serdar said, noting that production is projected at 15 million pelts to 18 million this year, less than half of what it was five years earlier.
As a small farmer (190 females in this final season), Henderson said he cannot afford to wait for an upswing. Minks are not his sole income; he works two other jobs, so he is financially better off dropping out of the business.
Serdar has no plans to fold entirely, yet he will reduce production and hope prices turn around. Last year he produced 7,000 pelts but will cut back to 1,000 females for the coming season, he said.
Gengel, on the other hand, said he is investing and adding to the farm with the anticipation of some day passing the business to his son. Gerry Gengel, 19, already has a lot of firsthand knowledge about how the farm works, his dad said. “He is an equipment specialist. He’s very good with repairs,” Gengel said. “With all the equipment we use around here, that makes him very valuable.”
And with the way mink farming has been going, it makes him part of a vanishing breed.
