Any of you bigger beaver takers regularly weigh your castor and see how much weight it loses from fresh until ready to sell?

I generally hang mine for a couple of weeks in my shed with no heat or air (flipping them a time or two) and then take them into my drying room and finish them with heat and moving air for about 3-5 days. I generally lose 10-15% off the fresh weight and find it well glazed over and dry. There still may be a little moisture inside the pods but it seems to fetch top prices at the association auctions.

I'm interested if anybody keeps track of that kind of thing to see if your numbers look anything like mine at all.

On an average year...how many pounds of castor do you end up with ?

About 20 lbs of castor for every 100 beaver I take. In the last 20 years I have been between 22 beavers to 544 in a season. Last few years I've been a slacker though.

Here is my figures on Castor. From fresh wet to dry enough to sell, 15 to 17 percent weight loss. Castor I get in the mail, when it comes in wet from shipping, will loose on average around 6 to 8 percent. Castor that has been dried real well and shipped will loose around 3 to 5 percent. The only reason it looses any weight at all is because there is several pieces that may leak juice out of them and get everything damp again. I do get some smaller bunches in that only loose around 1 or 2 percent and sometimes loose no weight at all. The reason for this is that there isn't a lot of castor in a box that causes the castor to get squashed. It is almost impossible to ship large amounts without loosing some weight. Just to much castor laying on top of each other that mashes the castor on the bottom.
I have got castor in the mail that looks like it was just taken out of the freezer and put in a box to ship. It looks just like fresh castor when it gets to me. This kind of castor can take as much as 4 or 5 days of drying time again to get the good leathery skin to it again. Most of the castor that comes in only takes a couple days to be ready to buy.
I weigh every box of castor that comes in, as soon as I take it out of the box. I then record the weight as my in weight. The weight that I pay for is my out weight and that is recorded as my out weight.
I have been doing this since I started buying castor and also keep record of my own caught weight when fresh and keep my finished dry weight.
I also do all my wet Ginseng and Goldenseal weights and my finished weight on dry Ginseng and Goldenseal. The weights on roots change a lot on the ratio depending on what time of the year it was dug. The ratio from wet to dry really swings a lot from early summer to September on roots. When bought in the fall of the year, it starts in September at about 3 1/2 pounds of wet root to 1 pound of dry and root that is dug in Late October will go from like 2 3/4 pounds of wet root to 1 pound of dry root.
Well there you have it, probably more dumb information than you ever needed to know. Knowing things like this makes me a good buyer with a knowledge of what I am doing.

Good info

I tried this with about 2o pounds and lost closer to 25-29 percent. Was my castor then too dry ? Or did I just lose money by not selling semi dry castor. I prefer to sell castor green. If you use the above examples, and lose ,15 percent from green and 17 percent from fha or Nafa shrink plus 9 to eleven percent commission well you do the math....

I have about 30 pounds green right now and was debating trying this experiment again. Hope the Boss and others chime in here.

If you look at the FHA website they say never to put dry castor in plastic for shipping. But doing that caused me to have a box get wet and come apart during shipping which made USPS hold it in one of their distribution centers as potentially hazardous material. In short, a nightmare (which Don can very well attest to).

Another time I brought up an onion sack (which the auction houses say they should be in) with about 30 lbs to an agent in Seattle. He hung it in his fur shed for about a month waiting for the company truck to pick things up. He said it dripped the whole 30 days! That is what happens when you have castors pressing against each other with still some water weight inside those pods.

I typically lose about 10 to 15% in weight from green until glazed over and apparently dry enough. Maybe I need to get them even drier.

A guy I know lost 26% shrinkage to NAFA so the next year he pressed all the liquid out dried them twice as long and they still charged him about the same % shrinkage. So his thinking is better to just ship them green if that's how it is.

We used to hear that the industry wanted them semi-dry and that some liquid in the pods was desirable. Now it seems that no liquid at all is what they want.

No one else has any castor drying numbers they'd like to share ?

I don't buy green castor, so I don't even weigh it green. When I get green castor in, I hang it, dry it, then weigh it. I then let the owner know what the weight is, and give him/her the option to sell, or have me ship it back. So far, no one has requested it to be shipped back to them.

I always request shippers to put their castor in two or three zip lock bags. I don't want leakage and that short amount of time in the zip lock doesn't affect the castor. No way would I suggest long term storage at room temperature in plastic though.

What's best long term storage method in freezer for green castor ? Dry castor ?

I've stored dried castor frozen in zip locks for two years with no ill affects. I doubt that green or dry would make any difference as long as it's in a frozen state.

Ever since Beaver peeler and I had a bit of Castor fun, I always tell my shippers to ship in at least two Ziploc bags and it wouldn't hurt to put them in a third plastic bag. I have never noticed any kind of problem with castor going bad during shipping. I do know that some castor comes in dripping wet. It reminds me of castor that was just taken out of the freezer and shipped. Castor that comes in that wet can loose almost as much weight as fresh castor.